Regenerative Learning Architecture. The School Campus of Vimercate as a Unit of Urban Morphology

Over the past decade, the need for innovation in school buildings has emerged globally. While schools are supposedly seen as pivots of districts’ fabric and community life, insufficient theoretical explorations and design strategies have been devoted to learning architecture and its urban role. Innovation focusses merely on indoor environment in terms of learning zoning, modular furniture and flexible classroom settings in relation to new teaching forms and digital technologies. Rooted in the tradition of Italian urban studies, the paper discusses one research by design reframing innovation challenges from the indeterminate concept of environment to the language and themes of architectural space in the framework of the comprehensive concepts of learning and regenerative architecture. The case of the dilapidated Vimercate High Schools Campus, Italy, is a far-sighted take on the crucial theme of the redevelopment of a 1970s school campus that constitutes an extra-urban morphological region as wide as the town’s medieval centre. Under the conceptual instrumentation of regenerative architecture, the research has inverted the traditional idea of the school as a self-contained citadel making the complex a potential cultural pole strategically located at the intersection between historical and rural landscape circuits.By defining precise themes and techniques of rewriting, learning spaces have been reshaped in analogy with urban form types and landscape, establishing porosity degrees with the surrounding urban structure, introducing functional promiscuity of activities between the town and the educational enclosure, reshaping learning environments as architectural space-places and finally designing new spatial concepts to guide the actions of the public administration.