Una scuola in forma di città. Architettura urbana rigenerativa / A School in Form of the City. Regenerative Urban Architecture

Over the last ten years, the innovation of school buildings has emerged as a hot topic even in Italy. Although recent documents1 recognise schools as community centres and catalysers of community life, theoretical-design surveys have targeted the pedagogical innovation of indoor space and the opening of school services beyond teaching hours2 – therefore failing to disrupt a view of the school as confined to its interior microcosm, enclosed and disconnected from the relations and the discourse on the city3. Yet, until the 1980s, schools designs and construction of places were mutually intertwined. The rehabilitation project of the Vimercate High Schools Campus, still underway, has instead experimented a scale and an approach combining the issues of “educating architecture” 4 with the redesign of the school as an integral part of the city, to the point of experimenting compositional strategies for a “school in form of the city”. Built in 1975 as an example of prefabrication to address the educational emergency resulting from demographic growth, similarly to other mega-schools of the 1970s-1980s the complex constitutes an “anti-city” isolated from the urban reality. Currently gathering, albeit unsuccessfully, four different schools and about 4,500 students, the complex represents a dilapidated city part that, while being as large as the medieval city core, lacks the latter’s spatial, functional and morphological richness. Its oversimplified structure, devoid of character and recognisable spaces, exemplifies the decay now affecting these mega-schools: overcrowded, with rundown spaces and inadequate in terms of facilities and safety standards, energy consumption and exposed to seismic hazard. The design research, conducted by ICAR 14, emerges as a key tool capable of addressing such issues through formal proposals of spatial reorganisation, and of probing the role and tools of an urban architecture capable of regenerating the territory it addresses by providing key services. In confronting directly with the existing structure, the architectural design explores strategies of re-morphologisation and compositional techniques of rewriting, overwriting, collage and grafting5. The hybrid spaces shared with the city, as well as the educational and transitional spaces are redesigned by analogy with the form of the city places, thus establishing selected degrees of porosity and introducing an original functional blurring between city and school, while restoring the identity of each Institute and remodelling the educational realms in the form of “space-places”, each with a recognisable character.