A lesson about the form. Dissonances and complementarities in Luisa Anversa Ferretti’s and Giuseppe Samonà’s projects for the extension of the University of Cagliari

Andrea Manca;Giovanni Battista Cocco

2022-01-01

---

Abstract

At the end of the 1960s theoretical reflection on the relationship between urban form and territory, of which Giuseppe Samonà and Vittorio Gregotti were the major exponents in Italy, found an active field of design experimentation when the legislative measures to modify the Italian university system were implemented. This led to the need to expand the real estate of many universities, which promoted various international design competitions, encouraging reflection on how to relate parts of the extended city, in which the design of open spaces took on a unifying role. The project coordinated by Luisa Anversa Ferretti won the competition for the extension of the University of Cagliari, but for this study, the proposal put forward by the group led by Giuseppe Samonà is just as interesting. The two projects, in fact, are based on different registers of interpretation and qualification of open spaces: for the former, the measure is that of the territory, of the relationship between the great landscape systems; for the latter, the relationship is limited to the architectural dimension. The realisation of the project, which only partially translated the results of the competition, led to the current ‘Cittadella Universitaria di Monserrato’: a monad still disconnected from its context, made up of non-homogeneous architectures which enclose open spaces that are difficult to interpret. To make up for this condition of incompleteness, the design work carried out in recent years is based on the hypothesis that by combining and complementing the lessons learned from both projects, which are still extraordinarily topical, it is possible to achieve that reconciliation between different natures of form, places and uses necessary for the contemporary needs of this metropolitan element.