ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part discusses how several Italian architects and design teams approached the design of universities with this as the underlying question. In Italy, a country emerging from two decades of fascist dictatorship, the critique of top-down authority was charged with added value and was made even more complex by the lack of a tradition of university planning comparable to the Anglo-American one. Ever since Wilhelm von Humboldt reformed it in 1810, ‘inventing’ the term ‘research’ as a counterpart to the traditional goal of teaching, the story of the modern university has been ruled by one dominant principle: the principle of concentration. When, in the 1960s, higher education needed further expansion, spatial concentration had become a widely contested political issue, associated as it was with the growth of top-down control by sovereign national and industrial power.
