RICERCA ITALIANA     

Criteria and university construction requirements. Conversion of historic settlements and new interventions.

Politecnico di Milano

Abstract

The university is a major civil and developmental focus for the country. The manner in which universities have been built throughout Italy according to specific systems is neither pragmatic nor connected to the functionality of research and teaching. It has to do with the city, with the role of public buildings and architecture; it has to do with fitting into urban life and its flows.
The types of university buildings and of the activities carried out there have traditionally been seen as autonomous, beyond spatial correspondence with their surroundings. Moreover, university centres have been constructed since the Middle Ages on the basis of segregation criteria, both physical and associative. They have been established according to principles of university autonomy that have in many ways been perpetuated up to the present time, to the extent that, at certain times, the university has been a form of "anti-city", a self-sufficient organism. It is no accident that, for long periods of time, universities were identified with monasteries and cloisters, with a complex, interwoven logic of introversion and extroversion in community life. And it is no accident that these experiences have had an influence on the various forms of "campuses" and "university towns".
The fact is that, during the modern, contemporary era, the university has become a major terrain for experimental research in architecture, and that significant aspects of the >>>

Principal Investigator

Daniele Vitale Politecnico di MILANO

Research Objectives

The general objective of the research is to focus on new planning criteria for universities, overturning the usual priorities.

First of all, reversing the central place usually given to the problem of new university buildings. This is not a question of returning to prioritising recovery but rather of seeing new interventions and recovery interventions as part of the same project, to be conceived as a whole, of the integrated design of university buildings. It is a question of imagining that the same building, whether modern or historical, may be subject to restoration, adaptation and extension at one and the same time. Finally, it is a question of seeing interventions involving open/public spaces and those involving buildings in necessary relationship to each other, as if they had been conceived as a whole and contribute, as a whole, to redefining building design. Which is the way in which the problem actually presents itself in the life of universities and in the body of cities.

Secondly, overturning the usual relationship between superficial construction, based on type elaborations and performance criteria, and design research. It is appropriate, for the historical situation in which we find ourselves, not to proceed inductively, from the setting of criteria and planning schemas, but to focus on concrete cases and, departing from this basis, to rethink, in all-encompassing way, the standards and choices to be prescribed. In reality this also >>>

First Results

The expected results belong to three categories.
(I) Projects. To begin with, the idea is to eleborate a series of substantial projects, depending on various universities and coordinated with each other. The topics and the places have been chosen as to each be representative of an issue and have exemplary character.
Each of these themes has been at least partly agreed on or discussed with the university which proposed it, or with its technical offices, and will be more so where the research will take place. This will give the research maximum substance and possibility of verification. The chosen situations are of different types and can thus be indicated:
a) rehabilitation and adaptation of modern buildings (twentieth century, especially of the second half), with different typology (classrooms, laboratories, departments); these are based mainly on frame structures of reinforced concrete (Milano Politecnico; Parma; Padova; maybe Milano Bocconi);
b) rehabilitation and adaptation of historical buildings, belonging to different periods and with different functional origin, adapted or to be adapted to university use; these have a load bearing wall structure (Milano Università Cattolica; Padova);
c) reform operations on sections of campuses or university quarters, redifining groups of buildings, giving new quality to public space, modifying the relationship between functions (didactics, research, laboratories, services), centralizing and >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The «scientific background», that is the cultural picture of the research project, is meant in different ways: a) as historical picture of the ideologies on university settlement and of their influence on the way the settlements have taken shape, especially in Italian cities; b) as recent picture of research on university buildings; c) as picture of the researches and experiences elaborated by the work groups; they establish the background and historical foundation of the proposed work.

a) historical picture of the ideologies on university settlement and of their influence on the way the settlements have taken shape, especially in Italian cities. This picture is important not only on the level of historical evaluation, but also because it has contributed in a decisive way to define the material settlements which it deals with, with transformation, conversion and recovery projects. The cornerstones are, to start with, the experience of Studium in historical italian cities and its interference with monastic tradition. This historical experience has had major consequences up to recent times, for example in Pavia university which settles in the neoclassical period in historical buildings situated in blocks of the roman city; but also with the case of the university citadel that Giovanni Muzio creates before and after the last world war in the monumental complex of S. Ambrogio in Milan, and with numerous other examples, also recent ones. It is a tradition that >>>