ABSTRACT
In May 1970, the Italian Ministry of Public Education launched an international design competition for the urbanistic redevelopment of the University of Florence. Requesting the development of a regional master plan for a new academic complex located outside the city centre, the brief offered an opportunity to restart a discussion on the form of city territories that had been put on hold around 1963. It also sparked controversy as to whether Italy was finally opting for the international trend of delocalising its universities to out-of-town sites. Against such criticism – most vocally expressed by James Gowan, a jury member in Florence – the winning team, led by Vittorio Gregotti and urbanist Edoardo Detti, defended their attempt to advance the discussion beyond a narrow line of reasoning in terms of inside-versus-outside and, instead, to reconceptualise the very idea of the city. The entries submitted in Florence, and at the subsequent and similar competition for the University of Cagliari, shared a rejection of the campus as a self-contained settlement. Such a rejection started vanishing, however, in the third competition in the series, for the new University of Calabria (1972). Here, the need to establish an institution from scratch in an economically depressed region with little physical and industrial infrastructure led to the self-sufficient campus being presented as an obligatory solution that would kick-start a virtuous process of territorial growth. The competition nevertheless still proved attractive to the Italian city-territorialists who flocked to enter it. Ultimately, these ended up being the last attempts to keep heroism alive, and they signalled a moment of historical change that became most evident in the following competition, in 1973, for the University of Salerno. A new set of preoccupations for a technological and systems approach ultimately shed light on the fatigue of a postwar architectural discourse that was entering its mannerist phase.
