Constructing the City through the School: Morphological Traces and Analogical Continuities in Educational Architecture

The large Italian school buildings and campuses built between the 1970s and 1980s mostly reveal a persistent disconnection from the city, in both theoretical discourse and architectural spatial concepts. Drawing on the Italian typo-morphological tradition, the paper examines three projects that instead demonstrate how educational architecture can reinterpret selected architectural types and morphological traces of the city to design new architectural layouts employing a form of urban archaeology as a design practice. Through a comparative reading of three emblematic projects, Carlo Aymonino’s School Campus of Pesaro (1970–84), Guido Canella’s Civic Centre of Pieve Emanuele (1971–78), and Gianugo Polesello’s University Campus of Las Palmas (1987–91), the study reveals how each design embodies a dialogue with historical urban orders and typological reinterpretation. Urban traces and architectural archetypes emerge as archaeological matrices, re-inscribed into new compositions that mediate between ancient and contemporary city forms. Therefore, school architecture is seen as an act of urban rewriting that assumes the city's traces and forms for grounding new parts in a renewed civic meaning. The school building thus becomes a civic artefact capable of reactivating the symbolic and structural continuity within its context. By analysing these architectures as analogical reconstructions of civic archetypes, the paper argues that school buildings, often considered specialised and isolated types, possess an unexploited potential to regenerate urban legibility and collective identity. Within the current discourse on urban form, regeneration, and the re-opening of educational institutions to the city, this paper frames the renewal of high school campuses as a laboratory for re-conceiving the school’s integration into the urban fabric, grounded in the structuring value of the city’s historical traces.