Programme

Reflecting about how the university is an inhabited space, we must take in account the nature of the relationships established over the time between the university’s facilities and their urban contexts. Indeed, the cities are spaces of intense proximities, and so are University campuses (Sassen, 2012), but when the Universities are embedded in the city, as it is in the European tradition, the flows of university life and the city overlay, interact, and—sometimes—conflict. 

The paper explores the impact of the university in the historical, urban fabric and tries to answer to the question if the university is “located in the city” or it is “part of the city” (Klump and Bickl, 2012). For this reason, we present the case study of the Università degli studi di Bergamo (founded in 1968) and its humanities campus. During the settlement process, many institutional and local actors proposed a suburban and unique campus model for the University, in the edge of the city. Conversely, the governance opted for a different model with a university based on three campuses (Humanities, Economics and Law, and Engineering) distributed on the territory but inserted inside the urban settlements, and this position has been re-affirmed over the time by several rectors. 

The sprawling campus occupies a relevant part of the historical city over the hill (Città alta) through the re-functionalization of several heritage buildings: Convento di San Agostino (14th–15th centuries), Palazzo Quattrini-Terzi (17th century), Palazzo Bassi-Rathgeb (16th century), and the Casa dell’arciprete (16th century). This presence is a driver in the process of urban regeneration (Gertler 2012, Paleari 2015) of the historical core of the city, defining a system (the “cultural backbone”) that creates a network of facilities and services of the University. 

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) was founded in Zurich in 1855 and has been directly linked to its city since its foundation «offering excellent conditions for learning and research, state-of-the-art facilities and an attractive urban environment». 

However, instead of focusing on the role of the urban ETH campus, or on the dichotomy between Gottfried Semper's historic building in the city centre and the 1970s campus on the outskirts, this paper focuses on a moment of transition. This process began in the summer of 1968, when ETH signed a contract to temporarily rent the former Globus Provisorium department store as accommodation for second-year architecture students. The unconventional, informal, and centrally located building became not only the setting of the 1968 student movements (which escalated into the so-called Globuskrawalle), but also a place for the renewal of architectural teaching, especially through the work of professors such as Heinz Ronner or sociologists and city walkers such as Lucius Burckhardt. The Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) took its first steps on the second floor of the Globus Provisorium, where also various exhibitions that shaped the architectural discourse in the institution were presented (for example, the exhibition on John Hejduk and Aldo Rossi). While at that time architectural education was being reformed from within, ETH official renewal of the curriculum also took place, partly reflecting the changes tested in the unconventional building and partly rejecting the innovations. 

The contribution centers on the educational agency of the Globus Provisorium as a testimony to the ETH urban campus's history of renewal and change, but also of institutional power and dynamics. Microhistory shows how space and architecture operate within an educational perspective and how they resonate on the curriculum of urban campuses. 

Designed by Henry van de Velde with the assistance of Victor Bourgeois and Léon Stynen as Belgium’s Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair of 1939, the Belgian Friendship Building was re-erected between 1941 and 1948 on the campus of Virginia Union University, a historically Black institution in Richmond, Virginia.  It thus precedes in date the more celebrated buildings that Ludwig Mies van den Rohe, Alvar Aalto, and The Architect’s Collaborative designed in the 1940s for the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University.  It also served very different political purposes.  While postwar modern architecture in the United States proved an effective means of Cold War propaganda, the improvement of facilities on the campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities during this period was closely tied to efforts to maintain segregation across the southern United States.  Although its arrival at Virginia Union was probably tied to such efforts, and its original functions included a display celebrating what Belgium trumpeted as its “civilising mission” in the Congo, its African American supporters and users converted it into an instrument of the Civil Rights movement.  Martin Luther King, Jr. gave at least five speeches in the building, and Virginia Union administrators, faculty, students, and alumni all campaigned againsf Virginia’s official commitment of “massive resistance and to instead achieve integration.  

At a lecture in 2021, Neil Kleiman, an urban policy professor at Tulane University and New York University (NYU) said of NYU, "We don't say we are in the city; we say we are of the city." Kleiman's refreshing take on the relationship between the university and its context positioned colleges and universities, and the places they occupy, in a dynamic and reciprocal relationship–in a feedback loop of co-creation. 1800 Berkeley Street, the original 1972 building that housed the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Santa Monica, California, participated in the urban life of its context through a new curriculum. Founded on a “school without walls” ethos, SCI-Arc embraced the school of the city in literal and pedagogical terms. SCI-Arc’s first building, a leased derelict warehouse that formerly produced LSD, provided an environment to test architecture and education through the use of a building, which Reyner Banham endearingly referred to as “architecture free,” devoid of “somebody else’s aesthetic ego trip.” The first school-wide design problem that founding director of SCI-Arc, Ray Kappe, assigned was a five-week assignment to plan the spaces of instruction at 1800 Berkeley Street and meant to give the students an opportunity to demonstrate their ideological attitude toward architectural education and to reflect on how physical architecture can support particular values and needs. This paper addresses the origins of SCI-Arc through the school’s use of its original building as an armature for design and pedagogy tied to its urban context.  

Based on a utopian design philosophy of elastic architecture, Andzrej Wejchert’s 1963 prize-winning campus masterplan for University College Dublin (UCD) at Belfield—a suburban site comprising thirteen demesnes, just three miles south of Dublin city centre—spoke to international preoccupations. Architecture’s post-war challenge was to make urban places as provocations, which would encourage greater community and spontaneity and the university was the ideal site to test such provocations. Certainly, Wejchert’s linear plan, with its cranked walkway spine, promised surprise and encounter, while his modular buildings inferred adaptability. Prizing connectivity, the young architect claimed his walkway spine to have the ‘status of a forum for the communal life of the college’ (Wejchert, ‘Competition Report’).  

Turning away from traditional quadrangle and city-block campus models to embrace a parkland idiom, the Belfield development was contentious for early 1960s Ireland. Known as ‘The National’, UCD was the country’s largest and arguably most Catholic and popular university. By moving to Belfield, it was rejecting calls to stay in culturally rich central Dublin. But with no meaningful campus through its 100 years, UCD had no architectural history; and consequently, no fear of the modernist. Above all, as the 1963 campus competition prescribed, the new architecture was ‘to be planned on a loose and flexible pattern... [and be] ...capable of being adapted and extended’ (UCD, Competition Conditions). 

While casting (new) light on the history of UCD’s move to the Belfield site, this paper questions the realities of aspired-for elasticity underpinning the original campus masterplan. Using the examples of Wejchert’s walkway and Arts Building, as well as Robin Walker’s contemporary Restaurant Building, the paper explores the origins and legacies of such prescribed indeterminism.

Our paper considers the spatial tactics employed by the University of the Arts London (UAL), Europe’s largest specialist arts university. UAL is an institution made of multiple institutions, with overlapping identities, operating on even more sites. As architects and urbanists, we have helped shape four of UAL’s six colleges to communicate and reinforce institutional identity while relating to different parts of city.  

One result is a building typology that maximises flexibility and collaboration on tight, urban sites. With uses stacked internally and vertically, boundaries between city life below and university life above are programmatically defined yet intentionally blurred. The new London College of Communication (LCC) keeps it in its historic neighbourhood while incorporating UAL’s administrative offices into one facility built over a major transit hub. For decades, London College of Fashion (LCF) operated across multiple sites - their new home brings them together for the first time.  

Similarly, Central St Martins was an early catalyst for bringing back to life a large post-industrial site in our King’s Cross Masterplan; and the Chelsea College of Arts seized the opportunity of the vacated Royal Army Medical College to conjoin four locations into one.  

All four college buildings have involved the consolidation of an estate accrued incrementally and incidentally in order to deliver long-term financial, intellectual, social and environmental value. Each is a vehicle for institutional transformation through creating new experiences for students and faculty. Each also has an urban role to play as an anchor for regeneration initiatives beyond its core pedagogical remit.  

Architecture history tends to make a clear distinction between urban universities woven into the city fabric, and non-urban universities beyond city boundaries. In Europe, the former type usually applies to more historic institutions, while the latter is more common among those founded in the post-World War II era. 

At first sight, this distinction applies to the two German universities discussed in this paper: (1) the University of Freiburg, a classic urban university, rebuilt and expanded after WWII, and (2) the University of Konstanz, erected as a self-contained campus in the early 1970s. Closer inspection complicates this assumption, since both projects are the results of careful urban planning. In Freiburg, architects sought to stress the university as an integral, but permeable part of its city environments and linked the project to Jane Jacobs’ idea for a democratic and livable city. In Konstanz, they chose the leitmotif of “die Universität als Stadt” (EN: “the university as city”), stressing, among other things, high density, horizontal communication, and diversity of use.  

Inspired by these examples, the paper proposes to destabilize the sharp distinction between urban and non-urban universities, and explore the critical-analytical potentials (historically, socially, epistemologically) that arise from viewing also universities hitherto considered non-urban as “academic cityscapes”. In the given case: investigating how these designs related to the city as a place and metaphor can contribute to a better understanding of the respective planner’s visions (but also blind spots) for a new democratic society.