”The design of a modern school must arise above all from the search for a space that is psychologically, as well as functionally, suitable for the development of educational problems”. So wrote Ciro Cicconcelli, winner in 1949 of the competition for an Open-Air School project and then director of the School Building Studies Centre of the Ministry of Public Education, which since 1954 has published the orientation notebooks resulting from the discussion between architects and pedagogists. A first goal of the debate on education is the reform of the middle school, which becomes unique and compulsory in 1960. In the same year, the school is the theme of a special issue of the architecture magazine “Casabella e Continuità” and of the XII edition of the Milan Triennale. In 1968, nursery school also becomes public and in 1969 access to university is no longer limited to graduates of the classical high school.
Meanwhile, demographic growth and urbanization have caused a boom in school building, with an average of almost 800 new buildings per year. In 1975, the first technical regulations on school buildings were issued by ministerial decree, which took into account the indications of the Study Centre, conceiving the building as a “homogeneous architectural organism and not as a simple addition of spatial elements, thus contributing to the development of the student’s sensitivity and becoming itself a tool of communication and therefore of knowledge for those who use it”. Experiments on prefabricated architecture began in those years.
“University. Designing the change” is the title of no. 423, of “Casabella” of 1977, dedicated to the debate on the reform of the University, after a decade of protests that, from politics, pass to architectural and urban planning. University buildings, more than other school buildings, due to their size, the coexistence of a multitude of activities and the significant flows of users, represent real infrastructures, capable of radically modifying entire areas. Often inserted in the urban context or in proximity, if not contiguity, of historic buildings, universities can also lead a completely autonomous life, in the form of campuses or university cities. The autonomy of the institutes is precisely at the center of the reforms on the Italian school and university organization between the 20th and 21st centuries, with implications also on the conformation of their spaces.
The itinerary therefore allows us to reflect on the role of school and university architecture in national socio-political events and on its ability to plan change.
