Lugano University Campus

Lugano, 2010/2011 

Federico de Molfetta and Carlo Gandolfi

with Roberto Bonadeo 

Project type: international contest

The project gives value to the relationship between collective buildings and open spaces.
These spaces avoid the elementarity and vagueness of a rudimentary and mechanical interstitiality: they aspire to become part of the city, to be for the city.
 

Landscape and Architecture 

The reasoning on the Cassarate system – Campus USI – Parco Ciani – Lago includes a careful look at the role of a new and important urban moment. 

The Cassarate line – already legible as a veritable ecological corridor – thus ceases to be a border and ridge between two parts of the same fabric. It becomes a hinge and landscape resource able to connect Lake Ceresio to a sequence of open spaces that depart from the Ciani Park, pass through the University Campus and reach Cornaredo, creating a sort of counter-current path that allows you to rediscover the city from a new point of view. 

In the city, the new large-scale projects have always triggered subsequent outcomes: this is why the new Campus is not confined to its local specificity, but intends to become a new hub on an urban scale.
The new public space, with its own readable identity, acts as a counterweight to the current Campus, almost as if the project walkway served as a balanced arm of an ideal balance constituted by the two poles.