ABSTRACT
In 1970–1971, Vittorio Gregotti’s scheme for the University of Florence suggested that a university could be concentrated in space as long as it was part of a wider territorial plan whose elements were all carefully designed. A couple of years later, faced with a slightly different brief for the University of Calabria, he ended up leaving the urbanistic plan and focusing instead on the design of the academic settlement per se. Giancarlo De Carlo, Gregotti, and Guido Canella oscillated between the two poles, sometimes showing clearer sympathies for an overall maintenance of order, sometimes operating surgically on a dilution of power across a wider domain, and sometimes declaring more resolute opposition to the system. De Carlo’s plan argued for the dilution of the traditional concentrated academic power structures through their dislocation across a vast urban territory via a mixture of repurposed buildings and new construction – and, hence, would involve some more ‘projects for roofs’.
