ABSTRACT
Professionalisation and empowerment, concentration and dilution – these are central notions around which a reform both of architecture and of higher education was attempted during the 1960s and the 1970s. It could be said that such a statement is nothing other than the confirmation that architecture partakes in the culture of its time, acting as one among many phenomena whose observation enables the decoding of a wider system of beliefs, attitudes, and objectives. Excellence and research are labels ubiquitously and unquestioningly attached to any talk on universities, so informality and the metaphor of the building-as-city are mottos used to promote the architectural production of higher education spaces. While waiting for architectural thinking capable of drawing large-scale connections in a similar way to that – for all its contradictions and naivetes – accomplished half a century ago, Italian universities, more broke than ever, nevertheless survive as a public, open service.
