Abstract

Between 1970 and 1973, four architectural competitions were held in Italy for the new Universities of Florence, Cagliari, Cosenza and Salerno. This article analyses the case of Cagliari, focusing on the winning design by Milanese architect Luisa Anversa Ferretti (1926). The crisis of the Italian University, which motivated this enormous building effort, was a result of the significant regional imbalance in the location of facilities and students; the higher education based on superficial knowledge, far from a critical spirit; and the divorce between university and society, which prevented knowledge exchange and transfer. The problem that mass university posed during the decades of the ‘60s and the ‘70s had a quantitative bias and a qualitative one: it was necessary to physically expand the university in order to open it to broad segments of society; to structure the territory thanks to the idea of university as a communication system; and to review in depth the pedagogical strategies through a new departmental organisation. Despite not being widely known, the Anversa’s design for Cagliari is a paradigmatic case of a university that wants to be, more than ever, universal and ubiquitous, turning to a territorial dimension and a systems approach.