Urbino, Italy

How does a new architecture affect a medieval town without destroying it?

It's rare for an ancient village to develop a new personality, especially after UNESCO has slapped the label "World Heritage Site" on it, which for better or worse, can limit the evolution of a city. Nevertheless, the city of Urbino had architect Giancarlo De Carlo design most of its city center's new face since the late 50s. The city has really become two cities, existing symbiotically, one on top of the other.

Besides being Michaelangelo's hometown, the town features a lot of renaissance architecture and a castle, so it was a delicate - and at times debated - task to remodel. De Carlo's biggest and most successful intervention was the Carlo Bo university campus, built to melt into the very hills surrounding Urbino, But his plans for the city center were scrapped after famous trouble-maker Vittorio Sgarbi criticized it for ruining the Palazzo Ducale with his observatory project.

Despite Sgarbi's criticisms, De Carlo was a partisan during WWII and always an integral professional, defending participation of people in architecture both in theory and practice, being also an editor of Spazio e Società and organizer of his own summer school ILAUD. He detached from le Corbusier's international, modern style and wanted to design environment-integrated, socially-savvy buildings, even sometimes discussing the projects with their future tenants. Whatever his impact was on international architecture, his impact on the city of Urbino is undeniable.

Mission Report

Urbino's peculiarity resides in the fact that it has been the first university to open extensive mass facilities providing social and structural elements to ensure the inflow and retention of students. The presence of a large number of students in a small urban space (resistant to evolving into a big city, since its set up within a historical and architectural dimension firmly anchored to the structure and boundaries from Renaissance) have provided the basis for an academic community project.

This condition tends to equalize teachers and students, placing them in an urban dimension open to the possibility of extracurricular meetings and exchanges, a cornerstone of the project. Hence the particular features of integrated space which mix up the private and academic with the penetration of public space only ending at the bedroom door. The university colleges were designed as an immense square, a community environments and container where all experiences are shared experiences. The architect intended that colleges should be a resource for the entire city, a place which gathers all the citizens.

From the interviews conducted, we found different views about the use of Colleges, there are those who noted that the regulation is too rigid: the collective neurosis for security has reduced to a minimum the spaces of socialization where one could no longer use the Colleges for extracurricular living. Under the pretext of combating abuse, the administration invades the privacy of the students through pervasive surveillance.

Then, we found those who say that, compared to the second half of the nineties, the colleges were much less crowded. And that until a few years ago, the common areas of colleges were used as space for meeting and sharing. Since then, it's become much more difficult to obtain permission to set up any initiative. Huge areas of the Colleges, such as the Anfiteatro del Tridente, have gone vacant for years because they are not authorized by the administration to be used.

De Carlo wanted Urbino to have an urban tissue where students and citizens could be really well integrated, a dream unfulfilled because environmental niches have been created, and inhabited only by a precise part of the population. The Colleges, designed as a city in miniature, were thought able to connect different slices of population, which turned out to only accomplish one task: complete imbalance. Being close to a different university reality has been such an interesting experience. In a small city like Urbino, the students got many more chances to meet each other, especially compared to a big city like Rome, where they'd have to cover bigger distances.
Elena Magni, Stefania Ricciu