10.6092/issn.3034-8544/16732
The off-campus university student has a particular housing condition: temporary, but for medium-long periods, he is not a resident or a tourist. He is a temporary citizen, he requires adequate services and establishes relationships, he lives the spaces of the city that welcomes him. The city of students and the city of residents are two realities that are sometimes parallel and intertwined, producing wealth and social capital. The research intends to investigate the theme of student living through a paradigmatic project by G. De Carlo, the university colleges of Urbino, emphasizing the relationship between the city of students and the city that welcomes it. The research methodology reinterprets the work from a social point of view, investigating the relationship between the historic city and the campus, analysing the places intended for interactions, connections and collective spaces.
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Lorenzo Renzullo
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Urbana
Housing
Living in the University City. Giancarlo De Carlo and the University Colleges of Urbino
Text.Serial.Journal
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Thematic Section
2024-01-25
2023-04-11
2024-01-25
2024-03-20
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Urb
Lorenzo Renzullo
2024/01/25
10.6092/issn.3034-8544/16732
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University of Naples Federico II
3034-8544
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Housing
en
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Living in the University City. Giancarlo De Carlo and the University Colleges of Urbino
https://urbana.unibo.it/article/download/16732/17487
1
                                                                URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024              31




Living in the University City.
Giancarlo De Carlo and the University
Colleges of Urbino
PEER REVIEWED


Cinzia Didonna1

University of Naples Federico II

cinzia.didonna@unina.it

Lorenzo Renzullo

University of Naples Federico II

l.renzullo@studenti.unina.it


1.        Living as a Student. The Historic City and the City of Students.
The relationship between the city and the university, between residents
and new students, has different nuances dictated by the time of
residence, the services present, the connections, the reciprocal position,
the organization of the city.
«The city of students and the city of residents are two realities that are
sometimes parallel, sometimes intertwined, producing wealth and social
capital, but also discomfort and tension».2
There are also different types of university students: the residents, the
"commuters", who go there for lessons or exams and then return to their
family context and the off-site students. For off-site students, the
university represents a significant transition, with the consequent
transfer and change of habits in a new context. Each type of student
corresponds to a different way and time of experiencing the university
space. The students experience the city through a provisional and
temporary bond: cit(y)zens, passing citizens, live together with citizens,
historical citizens, born and raised in that place.
The contribution focuses on the relationship between the city of residents
and the city of university students, between the architecture of university
residences and the host context through a paradigmatic example.
Urbino is a city which in terms of history, culture and size constitutes a
paradigmatic example.


1
    Corresponding author.
2
 L. Ceccarini and I. Diamanti, "Urbino e l'Università: le due città," in Studiare a Urbino. Gli studenti,
la città, l'Università, ed. G. Maggioni and I. Diamanti (Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2013), 51.


                                                                             Copyright 2024 The Author(s)
                                                         This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.3034-8544/16732                         Attribution 4.0 International License
                                                                URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024             32




In the second half of the twentieth century, Urbino city-campus lived the
coexistence of equal numbers of resident citizens and students.3 Two
parallel ways of living that seem to touch each other without ever really
touching, where time, space and the feeling of belonging are the true
holders of the differences, delimiting the places of life, the rhythms of
daily life, the lifestyle, the activities, expression of social reality and
values. In these dualities, Giancarlo De Carlo's project for the Colleges of
Urbino serves as a paradigmatic example.
The contribution starts from a rereading of De Carlo's thought regarding
the relationship between the city and the territory, the basis of his
architectural production. The relationship with the context becomes the
key to understanding his projects, first with the Urbino town plan, then
the construction of the university colleges. The latter are therefore
analysed according to their relationship with the geographical, urban but
also social context, which can be observed in the articulation of the
architectural plans, sections, routes and individual rooms. Finally, a
reading from the large to the small scale covers the design of the colleges
in Urbino.

2.       De Carlo, the City and the Territory.

Throughout his career, De Carlo has carried out constant research on the
relationship between city and territory in design, through his teaching,
publishing and professional activity. City and territory, historic city and
new city, according to De Carlo, are two separable spaces but parts of a
single system, where the territory is an expression of human experience.
He presented a lesson in urban planning like a film at the 1954 Triennale,
on the occasion of the Urban Planning Exhibition; he presented his
research about the forms of collective participation to urban
transformations: «there is no intelligent and sensitive urban planner who
(…) does not recognize the imprecision, inefficiency or arbitrariness of
his action and not feel the discomfort of continuing to operate according
to abstract principles (…) on a reality that he is unable to approach and
know».4 With this reflection, De Carlo manages to identify those recurring
questions in his profession: the architect must design with the senses and
control with the technique5 since the physical design of the space arises
from local conditions and from the relationship with history. In fact, it is
in the historic city that De Carlo traces his compositional principles;
aware that «clearing the city of the idea of its own historicity, uprooting it
from its relations with the geography of the landscape (...) means making
it pure past and a tourist enterprise».6


3
  F. Vetrano, “Urbino: una città “in forma di università” ”, in Città universitaria. Dalle buone pratiche
all'identità, ed. P. Nappi (Ferrara: Faust Edizioni, 2015), 158.
4
  Giancarlo De Carlo, “Intenzioni e risultati della mostra di urbanistica,” Casabella 203 (1954): 24.
5
  Federico Bilò, A partire da Giancarlo De Carlo (Palermo: Gangemi Editore, 2007), 70.
6
  Vittorio Gregotti, Architettura e postmetropoli (Torino: Einaudi, 2011), 35.
                                                             URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024           33




According to De Carlo, the city is without models and evolves through
open, widespread, different systems; a city that mixes languages, uses
and practices, which requires respect for this multiplicity; the zoning
plan, in fact, corresponds to two closely related preconceptions: the
existence of an incurable antithesis between city and countryside and the
application of the urban plan to a determination in time and space. De
Carlo proposes a multifaceted approach to the development of the city
and in contrast with the theory of the compact city, he does not rely on a
formulary, but on the search for a methodological rigor capable of
restoring credibility to the design approach.7
The city that has seen the experimentation and application of De Carlo's
research is Urbino, to the point of declaring himself "jealous" of the city.
Its link with the city has had various vicissitudes, from the call by the
rector Carlo Bo with his idea of the city-campus to the master plan, the
university colleges, the faculties in the centre, etc.

3.       Urbino, an Idea of a Plan an Idea of the City.

De Carlo was called by the rector Carlo Bo in 1948 and an intermittent
planning followed for over fifty years. «I believe that my story with
Urbino should be viewed from a broad point of view and recorded in a
nuanced listening. I mean that in my works in Urbino I have grafted the
experiences I had in the rest of the world and on the other hand there is
always, in the fabric of my architecture, a warp or weft thread that leads
back to Urbino».8 With the Urbino Regulatory Plan of 1964, De Carlo
reorganised the territorial road system, connecting the city also to more
distant urban realities; he proceeded to rationalise the accesses to the
city, but the lack of homogeneity of the different urban nuclei prevented
the formation of efficient widespread facilities, so that the qualitative
increase of the city passed through the regenerative action of the
decentralised or degraded fabrics. «De Carlo in Urbino had an entire
historic city at his disposal as material. How does this reuse of the city
happen? Its pieces are disassembled, others are added, others are
changed; the relationships between the various parts change, the
relationship with the territory changes. This project of a new city uses
present and latent energy (…), the university becomes an open system
linked through services to the life of the city» (De Carlo, 1983, 98). He
proposed an overall rethinking of the city, based on the centrality of
cultural functions and institutions. In the 1950s, the Renaissance city was
transformed into a university city, providing for the recovery of the
consolidated center and the transfer of university activities inside pre-
existing buildings.


7
 Manfredo Tafuri, Storia dell’architettura italiana (Torino: Einaudi, 2002).
8
 Franco Bunčuga and Giancarlo De Carlo, Conversazioni con Giancarlo De Carlo: architettura e libertà
(Milano: Elèuthera, 2000), 113.
                                                              URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024             34




An essential aspect of De Carlo's cultural activity in the years preceding
the design of the “Collegio del Colle” concerns his international
experiences, which led him to theorize a new model of expansion such
that «Urbino today is three cities: the historic centre, the suburbs and
university colleges. This is because (…) the weight of the universities, (…)
has become strong, therefore, has generated phenomena of expulsion
from the historic center (…), for which the objective is to control
peripheral development, using "the surplus of built volume” in the
historic center and set a limit to outsourcing with possible external
settlements (…)».9

4.        The University Colleges of Urbino.

«My effort was to build an unquestionably contemporary university
settlement but permeated by the echoes of historic Urbino: to the point
that the citizens could consider it another part of the city they already
knew (...). In other words, the intention was to establish a permanent
exchange between the historical city and the city of the Colleges».10
De Carlo rejected both the model of the campus, self-sufficient and
decentralized, and that of the university dispersed in fragments, but
nevertheless thought of the university as an articulated and multipolar
system, in which the settlement principle seeks a balance between
private, public and semi-public areas. Reflection on the civil and social
role of education was at the fore in the project of the Colleges of Urbino,
favored by an unprecedented cooperation between the Superintendency,
the Municipality and the University.




     Figure 1| The relationship between the city of Urbino and the Colleges, territorial section.
                            Credits: Cinzia Didonna, Lorenzo Renzullo.


In the colleges of Urbino, De Carlo sought that «urban measure
appropriate to what the city of Urbino was and is now, and to what it could
be in the future»,11 with the aim of designing a complex «opposite and at
the same time analogous to the stronghold of the medieval city and which


9
  ibid., 141-143.
10
   ibid., 132.
11
   ibid., 176.
                                                           URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024         35




allows us to rethink the city as an entity on a territorial scale».12 The
architect recounts how, using the principle of time simulation, he
considered the college the first nucleus of a city which, as it progressed,
took on similar but different configurations, because the characteristics
of the place and the human experience changed; and in order not to make
the simulation including all the variables artificial: of nature, of the
landscapes, of the inhabitants; dislocated the student accommodation
outside the city walls, in the expansion area near an ancient convent, the
University College is no longer expressed in a finished and immutable
design, but «it is rather an open, dynamic, changeable system»,13 proving
to be part of the city, it reproduces the urban elements of the historic city
[Figure 1]: the variable texture of the paths, which offer a plurality of uses,
the scale ratios, the uniformity of the materials and technologies.
The first nucleus, made up of the “Collegio del Colle” (1962-66),
established a peculiar dialogue with the morphology of Urbino [Figure 2],
generating «an organism in the form of a city»,14 while the second
nucleus, made up of the New Colleges (1965-75), configured the entire
complex as a «piece of city».15




                         Figure 2| The colleges and the city of Urbino.
                          Credits: Cinzia Didonna, Lorenzo Renzullo.



12
   F. Zuddas, “Pretese di equivalenza, De Carlo, Woods e il mat-building,” FAmagazine 34 (2015):
45-65.
13
   Giancarlo De Carlo, “È tempo di girare il cannocchiale,” Spazio e società 54 (1991): 4-5.
14
   P. Nicolin, “De Carlo/Nicolin, Conversazione su Urbino,” Lotus 18 (1978): 4-41.
15
   ibid., 18.
                                                     URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024   36




5.    The Differences between Colleges: Accommodation and Collective
Spaces.

Considering the peculiarity of De Carlo's architecture, the methodological
choice of this essay fell on re-reading the work of the colleges for the
relationship with the historic city and the collective spaces. Brief
descriptions of the complexes, their peculiarities and differences in the
places intended for interactions, collective and residential spaces and the
multiple connections are presented below.
The buildings are presented in chronological order according to the year
of construction. In this way, it is possible to assess how thinking evolves
over time and is reflected in the built architecture. The following image
compares the different college plans, showing the routes, private and
communal spaces.




                    Figure 3| Typological plans of the colleges.
                    Credits: Cinzia Didonna, Lorenzo Renzullo.
                                                         URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024         37




“Collegio del Tridente” presents the building dedicated to common
services on four levels, with classrooms, canteen, kitchens, parking and
some rooms that can be used freely. The first two levels, partially
underground, form a continuous plate on which the public square is set
up which, built with exposed reinforced concrete pillars, follows a radial
grid. The residences branch off from this building in three branches: 352
single rooms organized into blocks include 16 rooms arranged on two
levels and share services and two common areas; in this way the students
are «responsible for their common spaces all together; and for this they
must make agreements, communicate, respect each other».16 The
juxtaposition of the blocks allows for the differences in height to be
absorbed, while access to the terraces on the roof is via metal stairs.
A strong emphasis on the collective space both outside and inside,
dedicated to the different functions, respecting the territory, helping to
experience it, reading it in the ups and downs, crossing it and observing
it from the different paths made of ups and downs.




16
   Franco Bunčuga and Giancarlo De Carlo, Conversazioni con Giancarlo De Carlo: architettura e
libertà (Milano: Elèuthera, 2000), 135-136.
                                                       URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024   38




                  Figure 4| Plants of the college “Collegio Tridente”.
                     Credits: Cinzia Didonna, Lorenzo Renzullo.


“Collegio del Colle” was built between 1962 and 1965, it is the first college
built by De Carlo in Urbino and includes 150 single rooms, arranged
around the building that houses the common functions: spread over four
levels above ground, one partially underground, it has living rooms,
reception, manager's apartment, conference room, canteen - restaurant
with kitchen, offices and service areas. The square leads to the upper
levels, where the concierge and conference room are located; from here
one descends to the living rooms and spaces located on the lower levels,
from which the external pedestrian paths branch off which give access to
the residences. The residences are organized in 10 blocks, each of which
                                                     URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024   39




contains from 12 to 20 single rooms with private bathrooms and are
arranged on two levels, connected by a system of covered paths [Figure
3]. The communal functions are barycentred with respect to the
residences, open to the public and residents, testifying to a concern for
privacy, but also an openness to the city.




                      Figure 5 | Plants of “Collegio del Colle”.
                    Credits: Cinzia Didonna, Lorenzo Renzullo.


“Collegio delle Serpentine” comprises 152 single rooms organized in 3
blocks, each of which includes up to 7 cells/apartments containing 8
                                                     URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024   40




rooms on two levels. On the lower level of each apartment there is a
double-height living space, the kitchen and shared services, while the
bedrooms are located on the upper floors. While containing the same
elements, the blocks and apartments are all different from each other. ln
each of the apartments, the rooms are in fact organized in a different way:
these small adaptations make it possible to move the composition and, at
the same time, to accompany the natural slope of the site.
Personal care is placed at the centre, in the choice of customisation and
in the division of interior spaces (living room/bedroom). an approach that
therefore occurs at all project scales.




                     Figure 6 | Plants of “Collegio Serpentine”.
                    Credits: Cinzia Didonna, Lorenzo Renzullo.
                                              URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024   41




“Collegio della Vela” is set on the fundamental axis that connects it to
“Collegio dell'Aquilone” and the common areas are not located in a
separate building, but are arranged, together with the residential blocks,
in 8 sloping rows which include a variable number of rooms. 156 single
rooms and 33 double rooms share a common area which includes toilets,
showers and a small cooking area and are organized in blocks connected
to each other by an internal path onto which small living spaces open;
while on the fourth floor there is a larger space conceived as a real
internal garden crossed by light metal walkways which constitute the
element of continuity of the path on the roof. Here again, the relationship
with common spaces is fundamental, with a relationship with personal
and public green spaces; interstitial spaces become important in
neighbourhood life.
                                                     URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024   42




                      Figure 7| Plants of “Collegio della Vela”.
                     Credits: Cinzia Didonna, Lorenzo Renzullo.


“Collegio dell'Aquilone” is the first of the New Colleges to be built, it has
128 double rooms and accommodates 256 students. The rooms are
organized in blocks of 4 units, aligned to form 4 arms. Each arm contains
8 blocks and is crossed by an internal and external irregular path. The
stairwells between the blocks allow access to the roofs of the rooms,
which form practicable terraces. At the center of the complex is the
building that contains the common services, with a square planimetric
layout on five levels above ground and a full-height central space, around
which the spaces open to citizens are organized on the upper floors, while
                                                      URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024   43




on the levels lower than those dedicated to students. It encompasses all
the elements tried and tested in the previously constructed buildings. the
relationship with the public, with the land and with private spaces is
evident: a city within a city, with a landscape context that is always the
protagonist and an interior shaped to it.




                    Figure 8| Plants of “Collegio dell’Aquilone”.
                    Credits: Cinzia Didonna, Lorenzo Renzullo.
                                              URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024   44




6.          The Social Meaning.

«There were few people, but those who were there greeted me, stopped
to talk, and if they knew me - janitors, cooks, guardians - celebrated my
return. I felt in a city that I knew well, I felt…at home?».17
The Colleges of Urbino retain within them a profound social dimension,
rooted in the constant dialectical relationship between project and users.
In developing the entire project, the architect takes into consideration
three variables: the characteristics of the area, the presence of the city
and the formal connections with it, the demands of social groups. In fact,
De Carlo's work does not simply represent a space set aside for a
residential function but qualifies as a place for social interaction. The
social purposes of the architect's project are also demonstrated by the
significant cultural value that "nomadic" users and "sedentary"
inhabitants recognize both for the architectural quality of the spaces and
for the community principles that they reflect. In fact, the social value of
the complex is also recognized with regard to the aggregation and
socializing function for the student community: the availability of
meeting spaces and common areas have always stimulated the
development of cultural initiatives and favored exchanges and
interactions. These elements of both a social and spatial nature influence
in providing the inhabitants of the colleges with a certain sense of
belonging and an identity value. The experience in the boarding school
therefore assumes the value of a transition between dependence and
housing independence towards a participatory dimension, by virtue of
which the boarding school rises to a more intimate dimension, becomes
the home, understood as a family place.




17
     ibid., 140.
                                                                URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024            45




                                 Figure 9| The colleges of Urbino.
                            Credits: Cinzia Didonna, Lorenzo Renzullo.


7.       Articulation of Meanings: Paths, Individual and Collective Spaces.

«They tell me that you can get lost in the colleges and I think that getting
lost is the best way to understand the place».18 In the College buildings,
De Carlo worked on the proximity, continuity and maximum possible
variety of spaces, moving from one space to another, from public to
private, from individual to relational, moving in an articulated system of
places public connections through walkways and paths, corridors in the
form of roads. Addressing the theme of the university as an engine of
urban development, De Carlo has shaped a university settlement;
therefore, the housing cell becomes a space-generating element for the
student. In fact, the new university residences and their typological
proposals assume the topography of the ground, both in the relationship
of each of them with the place and in the intimate relationships between
the residential ensembles themselves, divided into clearly recognizable

18
  M.P. Borgarino, A. Troisi, N. Bazzoli, D. Del Curto and A. Sansonetti, I collegi di Giancarlo De Carlo
a Urbino, piano di conservazione e gestione (Milano: Mimesis Edizione, 2019), 124.
                                                            URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024           46




groups. The college is therefore a building that «gives more to the
landscape than it receives from it, internalizing and differentiating it.19 It
is a huge threshold that has the character of a city, woven into a whole, a
geological formation.20 The colleges of Urbino represent an exemplary
case in which the design matrix is a dynamic structure, or rather an
evolutionary, organizational and generative fabric at the same time.
Recognizable geometries are used in an unconventional way, capable of
impressing lasting change and strong images, but the basic criterion for
the articulation of space has always been to use a measure perceptible by
man.21
Each college can in fact be considered autonomous and complete despite
being made up of a distribution system that leads towards public
centralities: «(…) one nucleus contains large halls for conferences and
meetings, another a general library, another a cinema, the second a place
of open-air projections and some spaces for shops, the third also a
restaurant (…). All contain rooms for meetings, seminars, reading, music,
games; but in each of the “nuclei” the places have a different character
(…)».22

8.       Conclusions.

The experience of the colleges of Urbino, which will accompany him
throughout his career, highlights De Carlo's research and his evolution by
specifying it. The colleges, all autonomous and different, have a common
methodological-design matrix: the careful investigation of the historical
and environmental context, with which the project is measured, reads the
signs of time and reinterprets the way of living, restoring an architecture
always "contemporary", specifically for the city of Urbino for residents
and students.
In constant relationship with the city of Urbino, the landscape context
and history, the collegium project captures within it the fundamental
elements of the city, re-proposing them at all scales of the project, from
the urban scale to that of the building, right down to the attention to
detail. Thinking architecture built for relationships, with the public, with
one's neighbours, with oneself, aware of being built for students, young
off-site residents who want to build a future as men, professionals,
citizens.
The project of the colleges of Urbino by De Carlo can still be paradigmatic
today since it questions the social and relational aspect of the university
residence, invites us to "learn from" the host city and from the life of the
students, so that the project is the result of a constant action of dialogue

19
   A. Van Eyck, “University College in Urbino,” Zodiac 16 (1966): 16.
20
   P. Smithson, “PS. su G.D.C. ovvero... pensieri provocati dalle immagini di un libro,” Casabella
550 (1988), 34.
21
   S. Woods, Candilis Josic Woods,Una década de arquitectura y urbanismo (Barcellona: Gustavo Gili,
1968), 157.
22
   P. Nicolin, “De Carlo/Nicolin, Conversazione su Urbino,” Lotus 18 (1978): 4-41.
                                                 URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024     47




and interaction, with the territory, with tradition, with people: an original
approach that far anticipated the thought of living as a contemporary
student, increasingly dynamic, made up of proximity and sharing.


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collegi di Giancarlo De Carlo a Urbino, piano di conservazione e gestione.
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Tafuri, M. Storia dell’architettura italiana 1944-1985. Torino, Einaudi, 2002.
                                               URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024   48




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Faust Edizioni, 2015.

Woods, S. Candilis Josic Woods,Una década de arquitectura y urbanismo
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