ABSTRACT
When the first architectural competitions for Italian universities were launched, some of the main voices in the postwar architectural debate seized on them as instrumental testing grounds for their theoretical preoccupations. Giuseppe Samonà and Vittorio Gregotti were representatives of two generations that, through a combination of theory, teaching and practice, aimed to develop the architectural discourse along the lines but also beyond the legacy of modernism. In 1959, Samonà, the director of the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, authored a book on urbanism that set a critical distance between the tradition of the Garden City movement, which he accused of mere technocracy, and the ambition to give voice to architecture in shaping what he termed a ‘new urban dimension’. Taking a different perspective based on the multidisciplinary excursions into geography and semiology proper to the younger generation to which he belonged, Gregotti developed a critique of the architectural project as the concomitant reading and modification of place, which he contrasted to the mythical idea of a primitive hut as architecture’s origin. Both architects were eager to understand architecture as an ordering device that aimed to create some form of stabilisation within the increasingly unstable and chaotic territories of postwar urbanisation. They also believed in the necessity of finding a formal response to the needs of societies shaped around the tertiary sector and devoted to consumerist faith and leisure. Their responses took the form of their projects for the universities of Florence, Calabria, and Cagliari, which they promoted as places capable of blurring a workplace, a shopping mall, an infrastructural node, and a learning environment. They proclaimed the university student as a worker in search of meaning within a vast urban environment and, as such, one who needed to cultivate a political consciousness. Yet, their membership of the very academic ranks attacked by those contemporaries – the students themselves – who were reclaiming such political consciousness placed their actions in an ambiguous territory where the ghosts of centralised authority and paternalism still haunted their ideas of the university.
