The Architettura e Disegno Urbano Study Programme at the Politecnico di MIlano

Is it legitimate today to ask ourselves about teaching methods and the intertwining of theory and practice? The question arises spontaneously in an era in which the city, with the architecture that is a substantial part of it, seems to have entered a sphere removed from any judgment and distinction; an era characterized, to paraphrase Lyotard, by the decline of "great narratives" where every founding notion of the city no longer seems possible. An interpretative hypothesis suggests that in Milan the roots of the School of Architecture in the context of polytechnic culture and institutional design that supported it, has always conditioned academic and professional trajectories, provoking tensions and sometimes heated internal conflicts. The identity of the Milan School is on the one hand expressed by a very high professional culture, representative - perhaps more in the past than today - of an enlightened bourgeoisie and industrial elite, while on the other it is profoundly characterized by the claimed centrality teaching as a practice capable of dealing with the transformation processes of the city "on an equal footing". It can be affirmed that the key point of the Milanese School is the discourse on the “structure” of the city, a term within which all the theoretical tension of the various protagonists is concentrated, both for the clear material and formal implications, and for the potential in an epistemological key. Within this framework, however, two lines can be traced: one more inclined to a rational explanation of architectural work, to a definition. within which all the theoretical tension of the various protagonists is concentrated, both for the clear material and formal implications, and for the potential in an epistemological key. Within this framework, following in the footsteps of the two books cited, two lines can still be traced: one more inclined to a rational explanation of architectural work, to a peremptory definition of architecture as an essence made up of stable, absolute and unchanging facts over time, where the city is a choral product of which architecture represents both a subjective and collective manifestation; the other more oriented, beyond any descriptive classification of urban phenomena, to identify in the forma urbis the materialization of structural factors, and in the type-morphological device the design synthesis of urban facts, even discontinuous in space and time, a real " spatial device ”variable and original with respect to the conditions of the context, understood as the historical becoming of a landscape in a structural and anthropological sense.