Francesco Zuddas

In 1964 the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki defined Megastructure as \u201ca large frame in which all the functions of a city or part of a city are housed\u201d (Investigations in Collectives Form, 1964). In the following years and decades, the term Megastructure expanded widely and it now includes architectures of different forms, functions and urban ambitions. Metabolism, Frei Otto, Constant A. Nieuwenhuys, Yona Friedman, Cedric J. Price, Archigram, Richard Buckminster Fuller are only a few of the protagonists who have developed a personal vision of the Megastructure and contributed to its evolutions. This issue of \u201cHistories of Postwar Architecture\u201d aims to collect several contributions in order to better define the theoretical implications, the architectural and urban declinations that the Megastructure assumed worldwide in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, the call aims to evaluate the topicality of Megastructure in relation to the present times

The thesis investigates the project of the city by looking at one of its main institutions, the university. If the production of knowledge is a constant element of human development the thesis argues for the possibility of considering the university – a privileged space for knowledge production since the Middle Ages – as a testing ground for new ideas of the city. Nevertheless, for a long time the university has been accounted as a separate element from society. As such, it has crafted for itself a condition of spatial self-isolation that would allow the processes of knowledge creation and exchange to unfold unobstructed by the daily chaos of urbanity. The university could thus be defined an anti-city; a place that is in a relation of inevitable, permanent separateness from urban space; a heterotopic place for a specific, heterotopic community. The definition of the university as a bastion of knowledge received its final condemnation when society acknowledged the momentous change th...

touching on More’s Utopia and Filarete’s Sforzinda but focusing on, most importantly for his argument, Albrecht Dürer’s Comprehensive Treatise on the Fortification of Cities, Castles and Towns. The ideal city Dürer proposes is square, the ‘first to render the sacred square city of scripture in terms of real architecture – drawn to scale and made buildable’ (55) and with it, Lewis argues, ‘Protestant city planning may be said to have begun’ (54). The following chapters describe a series of settlements in Germany and mostly Germanic settlements in the New World which meet Lewis’s definition of a ‘city of refuge’. This is the real meat of the book, replete with stories and images. Example follows example of sanctuary cities that are ‘orderly, with repeated house types and a regular street plan’ (11), most of them square in plan. Some are well known, some not so well, some surprising. They begin with Freudenstadt, founded in Swabia in 1598, the ‘first formally planned city of refuge’ (57) and end with Harmony and Economy, George Rapp’s nineteenth-century first and third towns. Along the way, we visit Christianopolis, Campanella’s City of the Sun, New Haven CT – according to Lewis, ‘the first religious sanctuary in the Americas to express its social order through ideal geometry’ (78) – and Philadelphia, German Huguenot settlements, and Moravian settlements in Germany and America. The detail is extensive, the illustrations – some of them never before published – revealing. The least satisfying part of the book is the short final chapter. Entitled ‘Conclusion’, it is largely about Robert Owen’s New Harmony and James Silk Buckingham’s Model Town. The few pages dedicated to conclusions focus on the place of these cities of refuge in mainstream socialist thought and the way in which Friedrich Engels used them as examples of the success of communal living. Lewis claims them as ‘one of the historical sources for international socialism, surely the single most influential force in the past two centuries’ (217). This is a major claim, but surely there is more to be said about these complex and fascinating societies. The architecture and urban planning that is so much a focus of the core of the book gets short shrift in the conclusion, an odd omission in a book subtitled ‘Separatists and Utopian Town Planning’, which leaves the reader wondering what to make of all those lovingly described plans in the previous chapters. Nevertheless, City of Refuge is well worth reading for its detailed descriptions of the architecture, planning, and social structure of the settlements it includes.

In 1976 Reyner Banham codified megastructure according to its mere pragmatism and lack of ideology, the essential qualities given by the British contribution – from Cedric Price to Archigram and their celebration of technology for a nomadic homo ludens. On this point he contrasted the Italian mega-architecture of the same period, dismissing it for its political collusions and figurative anxiety. While it is a truism that the postwar Italian architectural discourse was imbued in political ideology, Banham’s dismissal purposely misses out the intricacies of a period still awaiting thorough international reconsideration besides few recognised highlights of theorisation. By reviewing a neglected project whose gigantism is second to none of Banham’s examples – Giuseppe Samona’s University of Cagliari – this essay digs into a chapter that ultimately reclaims its nature as outsider within the phenomenon of megastructure.

n the 1960s-70s, unrest in universities leads to the spilling out of the academic institution into the city - as is manifested in the student protests. The encounter between university and city is rapidly appropriated by architecture that turns it into one of the most used and abused metaphors to legitimate a sought-after epistemic break from the functionalist dogma. By considering the design and intellectual work done by Shadrach Woods and Giancarlo De Carlo on the changing condition of higher education, this article discusses two approaches to the metaphor university=city. While similar in their intentions – to the point of being grouped under the same label of “mat-building” – they diverge widely in the ways they propose how the architectural project could address such a metaphor.

Abstract In 1973, Andrea Branzi, founder of Archizoom, wrote a short review of Ivan Illich’s book Deschooling Society. The review constituted the fourth of 27 “Radical Notes” he published in the journal Casabella between 1972 and 1976. While this was the only one explicitly to adopt the review format, Illich’s presence permeates the Radical Notes as a whole. They can be read as a coherent pedagogical theory, the practical output of which was Global Tools, a counter-school promoted by Branzi and other members of the Italian Radical Movement. Branzi approached the review as an opportunity to re-view, to look again at the theses of Archizoom. His review thus sheds light on an important moment in the story of the Radicals, adding a pedagogical component to the political, Marxist roots of their critique of the nexus of city, labor and capitalism.

Abstract In the mid-1990s, Bill Readings compared universities to business corporations, sounding the alarm for an incipient corporatization of the academy that has provoked commentary since. Under neoliberalism, public universities are run as private corporations striving to survive in the increasingly competitive higher education market. The spatial side of this phenomenon is an architectural portfolio consisting of corporate style reception desks, turnstile-controlled entrances, bookable meeting rooms, and café spaces to learn. This article examines “the slow death” of the university as a space of scholarship focusing on the Sir John Cass Faculty of Architecture and Design (or Cass) in Central House (2012–17), London. As a public university acting like a real estate operator in a large metropolis, the Cass displays both complicity and resistance toward the managerial logics of universities. Its resistance lies in the architectural reconfiguration of Central House, which was eventually defeated by the institution’s real estate ambitions.

n 1973, Andrea Branzi, founder of Archizoom, wrote a short review of Ivan Illich’s book Deschooling Society. The review constituted the fourth of 27 “Radical Notes” he published in the journal Casabella between 1972 and 1976. While this was the only one explicitly to adopt the review format, Illich’s presence permeates the Radical Notes as a whole. They can be read as a coherent pedagogical theory, the practical output of which was Global Tools, a counter-school promoted by Branzi and other members of the Italian Radical Movement. Branzi approached the review as an opportunity to re-view, to look again at the theses of Archizoom. His review thus sheds light on an important moment in the story of the Radicals, adding a pedagogical component to the political, Marxist roots of their critique of the nexus of city, labor and capitalism.

Talvolta, i libri più rilevanti di architettura sono quelli che non parlano esplicitamente di architettura. A cinquant’anni dalla prima uscita, nel 1968 per l’editore De Donato, Quodlibet ripubblica 'La piramide rovesciata', un saggio cui Giancarlo De Carlo affidava le proprie riflessioni sulla contestazione studentesca.
Solo quando le istituzioni sono interrotte, affermava De Carlo, si può arrivare all’esperienza totale. Nel fervore attuale, forse inevitabile, di riletture del 1968, 'La piramide rovesciata' è capace di parlare al presente in una maniera più diretta di quanto cinquant’anni di distanza e di cambiamenti possano far pensare. Oggi, nell’epoca della completa commercializzazione del sapere, quando ormai il termine ‘ricerca’ (insieme al suo più fedele alleato, ‘eccellenza’, mediato dal mondo corporativo) è svenduto a basso prezzo e applicato spregiudicatamente da parte di una società che sembra apprezzare solo il nuovo a scapito della critica ricognizione di conoscenza già esistente, il messaggio lanciato da De Carlo per un’università capace di mantenere ‘l’esercizio continuo della critica’, e al contempo di non abbandonare la sperimentazione di forme di vita collettiva, si carica di nuova rilevanza e urgenza. Rileggerlo, inoltre, ci ricorda come parlare di architettura significhi necessariamente interessarsi di molto altro.

In an age of rampant commodification of all human values, advocating culture might sound like just one more word used in vain against the forces of capital that continue undisturbed in their action of erosion of anything that does not have an immediate monetary value. The same could be said for another term, city. When anything can be ascribed to the capillary condition of the urban, speaking of a city is increasingly far from the idea of some sort of social bond holding together a society. Yet, if we look at the etymological trajectory followed by the terms culture and city, we can start envisaging how both contain an element of opposition against two other words that are often mistaken as their synonyms: civilization and urbanization. In fact, the history of the 20th-century architecture and
urbanism has been shaped by the constant battle between those couples of terms and their respective advocates. In this sense, culture can be considered a strategy of resistance.
Seen as a response to the constant fluctuations and uncertainty of market-driven urbanization, the adjective 'cultural' adds a generic characterization to the buildings to which it is attached, with the risk of turning them into mere containers for multiple functions.

In 1976, Reyner Banham summarised megastructure as a mixture of pragmatism and lack of ideology, and he attributed the origin of such qualities to British architects – from Cedric Price to Archigram and their celebration of technology for a nomadic homo ludens. On this point, he contrasted the Italian mega-architecture of the same period, dismissing it for its political collusions and figurative anxiety. While it is a truism that postwar Italian architectural discourse was imbued with political ideology, Banham’s dismissal purposely ignores the intricacies of a period still awaiting thorough international reconsideration, besides a few widely recognised seminal texts by the likes of Manfredo Tafuri, Aldo Rossi and Leonardo Benevolo. By reviewing a neglected project – Giuseppe Samonà’s University of Cagliari – whose gigantism compares to any of Banham’s examples, this essay digs into a chapter of postwar architecture that ultimately escapes an easy classification in the history of megastructure as narrated by the British historian.

On the May 1968 issue of L’Architecture d’Aujourd Hui the Italian architect Guido Canella claimed that the university was an “anti-city”. Three years later, the Ministry of Education suspended him from his academic post.
Canella’s claim had not intended to express anti-urban sentiments; rather, it was a critique from inside the status quo of universities and architectural education in Italy. Since 1962 he had been experimenting with design education at the school of architecture in Milan. The school, the theatre, and the prison were the real-life topics he offered his students to investigate: the parts of what he called 'the system of learning', which he aimed to redefine. Canella’s studios reflected the experimental climate of the Milanese school, where a pedagogic revolution came out of increasing student unrest to destabilise an out-dated curriculum solely catering to higher education’s professionalising role. In 1967, Canella organised the most extreme teaching experiment: a mega vertical design studio with 100 students from first to fifth year. Itself the mirror of mass higher education, the gigantic cohort travelled to the depressed Italian south to rethink its fate by proposing a new idea of university that could tackle the challenges of a mass society. In the realm of Canella’s activist pedagogy, the realities of an academic course and a professional office blurred, written briefs were as long as books, confrontation was constant, and teaching took the form of a theatrical performance.
Canella’s pedagogic work and the teaching experimentation in Milan have been largely neglected by the recent euphoria for “radical pedagogies”. This essay aims to fill this gap and to unveil a prehistory of some aspects that, fifty years later and through a switch from ideological to economic prerogatives, have become engrained in discussions about higher education and architectural pedagogy, such as lifelong learning, student mobility, research-based learning, and the pedagogic idea of “live projects”.

A reading of the search for a new idea of university through the analysis of projects by Italian architects in the early 1970s. The projects and the architects considered (Vittorio Gregotti, Giuseppe Samonà, Guido Canella) are discussed as responses to the wider international boom of new university construction in the 1960s, the post-1968 socio-political climate, and the postwar Italian architectural and urbanistic debate.

In the 1960s-70s, unrest in universities leads to the spilling out of the academic institution into the city - as is manifested in the student protests. The encounter between university and city is rapidly appropriated by architecture that turns it into one of the most used and abused metaphors to legitimate a sought-after epistemic break from the functionalist dogma. By considering the design and intellectual work done by Shadrach Woods and Giancarlo De Carlo on the changing condition of higher education, this article discusses two approaches to the metaphor university=city. While similar in their intentions – to the point of being grouped under the same label of “mat-building” – they diverge widely in the ways they propose how the architectural project could address such a metaphor.

Within a widespread scenario of increasingly uncontrolled urbanisation and sprawling urbanity, architecture and urbanism are faced with the timely question of who should be in charge of defining an overall scenario that is capable of projecting some directions of city growth and restructuring. If we agree that the “idea” of the city cannot be completely left in the hands of the private sector for its delineation, we can understand the relevance that renovated critical thinking on the role of large institutions within the city can have for dealing with the current urban condition. Among those institutions, the university is charged with prominent responsibility. 
Overtime, the academic institution has undergone changes as far as its “mission” is regarded, leading to the current situation in which it is asked to enlarge its scope of action from the traditional missions of teaching and research towards novel engagement with the business sector and the possibility to play, once again, the role of beacon within the structure of civic values of a city. This academic trajectory has been coupled with the varying relation that the university has manifested with the city, a relation that has manifested via a wide range of architectural invention and experimentation inextricably interconnected with a concurrent varying conceptualisation of the city – from the university’s early days, that established the architectural-urban canons of the “college” and the “campus”, through the subsequent endless proliferation of “cities in the landscape” since the 1960’s university building boom, to the current reconsideration of the city as the proper condition for higher learning. 
Recent researches on the relation between city and university have proved that, at least as far as a European academic condition is concerned, the idea of a detached community - as represented physically by the innumerable declinations of the outlying campus – has vanished in favour of a renovated interest in inner city locations. However any attempt at the re-insertion or restructuring of existing premises within the city fabric of the academic institution must inevitably cope with the competition for urban space. Therefore, there emerges the relevance of novel thinking on the contribution that architecture can bring to re-conceiving the relation institution-city.

La ricerca indaga il rapporto tra la formazione della città e del paesaggio urbano e le forme di produzione contemporanea orientate all’innovazione. La fabbrica contemporanea non è il singolo laboratorio di ricerca o la singola industria. Non è neanche il cluster o il parco scientifico, nonostante queste siano le forme più diffuse in cui si è cristallizzato nello spazio il modo di concepire i luoghi per l’innovazione dagli anni ’60-’70 del secolo scorso a oggi. Non è, quindi, una realtà lavorativa auto-segregata all’interno di enclavi disperse in un crescente territorio urbanizzato. Le manifestazioni spaziali dell’Economia della Conoscenza, più o meno spontanee o progettate, sono in continua definizione e discussione. Si propone qui una lettura del tema “luoghi per l’innovazione” in relazione al farsi della città contemporanea. Recenti tendenze tendono infatti a ricollocare i luoghi per l’innovazione all’interno del dominio urbano. L’articolo riflette su tale ri-urbanizzazione dei luoghi per l’innovazione, distinguendo tra l’ambizione di rendere un carattere urbano all’arcipelago di isole innovative e il letterale re-inserimento nel tessuto della città.

(This article is part of the research project titled  “Luoghi per l’innovazione” by Francesco Zuddas and Sabrina Puddu, funded by PO Sardegna FSE 2007-2013, L.R.7/2007 ‘Promozione della ricerca scientifica e dell’innovazione tecnologica in Sardegna’).

From the 1980s onwards, Taiwan embarked a remarkable and almost unparalleled path that has led the region from a condition of underdevelopment and a location of low-wage activities towards a leading position in the global innovation-based economy. This has been the result of a highly fortunate set of economic and political strategies that have contributed to shape a peculiar regional landscape based on an almost endless proliferation of urbanity over the island’s territory. The spatiality that such urbanisation has created is one made of a dialectic juxtaposition between the opportunity for endless expansion (the opening of new territories through massive infrastructural improvements) and the limitation coming from boundaries of different nature and scales (topography, agricultural plots, campuses, clusters). A response to the parallel necessity for “openness” and “operative closure” proper of the new economy.
With a temporal gap of about fifteen years, in the mid 90s the government of Sardinia, a southern Italian region, has started the attempt to switch the economic base of the region towards one based on advanced services, knowledge-based activities and R&D. With the aim of following on the footsteps of previous international experiences, a few innovation-oriented developments have been planned. The result, however, has been much disappointing as the strategy of decentralization, despite its claim of a “democratic” balancing of resources throughout the underdeveloped region, has proved unsuccessful for it merely dispersed any possibility of putting together a consistent critical mass for innovation. At the same time, it has also showed incapable of creating the much sought capillary repercussions over the surrounding local condition, thus somehow retracing the same failure path of the previous incomplete industrial experience based on petro-chemicals.   
How can a strategy for the intensification of an extremely low-density and partly aborted network of innovation be envisaged? What is the spatiality that can best adapt to a highly unconnected island? Is the archipelago of specialised islands a potentially fruitful path to attempt in such conditions?
The paper aims to reflect on a possible strategy for southern Sardinia in which the metropolitan area of the island’s capital city, Cagliari, plays a major role as the only proper mature city-environment in the whole region and as its main service provider. By way of comparison with the highly contrasting case of Taiwan, where the spatiality of the network of innovation has been one of a “continuous urbanisation”, the intensification of a dispersed set of pockets of production activities in the form of integrated live-work communities could probably be a worthwhile strategy to put forward.

(This article is part of the research project titled  “Luoghi per l’innovazione” by Francesco Zuddas and Sabrina Puddu, funded by PO Sardegna FSE 2007-2013, L.R.7/2007 ‘Promozione della ricerca scientifica e dell’innovazione tecnologica in Sardegna’).

Within an increasingly dispersed urban condition,  an ‘archipelago’ in search for its centralities, ideas of the public realm are changing. Moreover, its spatial performance is becoming increasingly important for the way it manages to enhance aspects of collectivity and face-to-face relations, still un-replaceable for knowledge-based societies.
To maintain their status of ‘beacons’ for the collective, civic institutions are called to an internal restructuring driving them towards privatization and commercialization with immediate repercussions on cities, progressively becoming a pattern of privately-owned public spaces. The resulting programmatic complication of the institutions is urging for a thorough reflection on its spatial implications. 
Among the institutions that can act as centralities in the urban field, the thesis examines the potential of universities as generators of urban location. We observe a disjunction between current academic statements of ‘opening up’ to the city and the lack of an adequate level of urban/architectural thinking. The advantages deriving from a conceptualisation of universities as an ‘urban issue’ rather than as the performance of a single building are twofold: reinserted into the urban fabric, the university could improve the necessary networking to survive in market-led conditions; architecture could employ the complexity of the ‘university issue’ as testing ground for advancing its media.