The School as the City: Rewriting and Collaging an Urban Morphology. Vimercate Campus’ Design

In recent years, the debate around the innovation and rethinking of school buildings has restarted at an international level, driven by contemporary pedagogy and ICT technologies offering new active learning modalities and by the advocated role of school buildings as civic centres. Yet, Italian school buildings present an endemic lack of renewal and active integration in urban regeneration concepts. While schools should be seen as the pivot of districts’ fabric and community life, little theoretical efforts and no guidelines have been developed so far for school types as “Urban Architectures”, that is, essential units in regenerative processes and “Learning Architectures” rather than specialised functional types and indistinct learning environments. The paper presents research by design on the High Schools Campus of Vimercate (Italy) funded by the Provincial Government, which constitutes a morphological area as wide as the town’s medieval centre. Dilapidated large school campuses represent a higher challenge, as demolition is neither possible nor sustainable. In a “regenerative architecture” approach and under the conceptual instrumentation of “rewriting” on the pre-existing order, the design explored the School in Form of the City, probing remorphologisation strategies, collage procedures and design of new active space-places (Pezzetti 2019) to stimulate active learning together with an aesthetic experience of architectural space.