Carattere e caratteri della scuola. Il riverbero della tradizione

The recent wave of school architecture production and renewal in Ticino offers, both in quantity and quality, a useful lens through which to identify the signs of a possible tradition – one that might be linked to the «a great training ground» of Ticinese architects from the 1960s to 1980s, to borrow Bruno Reichlin’s eloquent expression. If the 2022 issue 2 of Archi, «School Architecture in Ticino», already attempted to trace the points of continuity and discontinuity within this tradition – stretching from the 1950s to more recent works – while noting decisive shifts in its foundational principles and relationship with the broader architectural discourse, this issue seeks to explore the vitality of that tradition by comparing it with a geographically analogous one: the case of South Tyrol, a reference point in architectural criticism for its exemplary processes of rethinking the school expressed through architectural language.