Between Urban Renewal and Nuova Dimensione: The 68 Effects vis-à-vis the Real

This article examines the effects of 1968 student protests on architectural education and epistemology within the European and American contexts. Juxtaposing the transformations within the north-American and Italian contexts, it shows how the concepts of urban renewal, in the U.S., and ‘nuova dimensione’, in Italy, were progressively abandoned. It presents the mutations of the architects’ role and the curriculum of the schools of architecture, taking into consideration significant episodes as the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and the Vietnam War protests. The six weeks student protests at Columbia University were related to the intention to respond to the fulfilment of needs related to the welfare of the society as a whole and the responsibility to provide equal housing opportunities and equal access to public amenities regardless of race, religion, or national origin. The strategies elaborated to criticize urban renewal in the U.S. often pushed architectural discourse away from the real, either neutralizing the real or reducing the real city to its image. In Italy, a network of events around 1968, extending from the fight between the police and the students outside the School of Architecture at Valle Giulia in Rome to the students’ occupation of the 15th Triennale di Milano in 1968 and “Utopia e/o Rivoluzione” at the Politecnico di Torino in 1969, triggered the rejection of the ‘nuova dimensione’, the rediscovery of reality’s immediacy and of the civic dimension of architects’ task. The 1968 effects on architectural education and epistemology in Europe, and especially in Italy, were linked to the reinforcement of the relation of architecture to the real, in contrast with the North-American context, where they stimulated the invention of design strategies related to the so-called “autonomy” of architecture and the primacy of the observer of architectural drawings over the inhabitants of real spaces.