10 universities that are architectural masterpieces, from Walter Gropius to Renzo Piano

Elitist places of knowledge transmission, platforms for sharing, materializations, sometimes rhetorical, of dominant ideologies, epicenters of protest or laboratories for imagining alternative futures: what are university spaces, really? From the very beginning, more than a functional infrastructure, the university has been an urban organism charged with strong symbolic meaning, a reflection not only of teaching and research, but of a society’s deepest aspirations toward knowledge itself. If today the university campus plays an even more complex and multifaceted role, it is because contemporary values themselves have become more complex to represent. Increasingly, universities conceive their campuses as true identity, political, and cultural manifestos.

Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture, Domus 914 May 2008

The polarization between enclosed and open campuses clearly reflects this range of attitudes, between inclusion and exclusion. It is particularly visible in contexts, from North America to Asia, where the campus has historically been conceived as an autonomous microcosm, often set within natural surroundings and separated from the urban fabric. Or in others, like the China Academy of Fine Arts campus by Amateur Architecture Studio, a testing ground of architectural prototypes where both rules and exceptions can be recognized, shaped by the idea that space itself should be the first to teach something to those who experience it.

In Europe and Italy, universities tend to inscribe themselves within the urban fabric, as in Venice with IUAV or Urbino with De Carlo’s colleges, or to evolve through successive additions, as in the case of the Politecnico di Milano, developed over time by Ponti, Portaluppi, Viganò, and more recently, Piano.

Today, education and research are the subject of ongoing debate, while technological development seems unstoppable, and this inevitably reflects on the spaces of higher education and their interaction with other forms of social organization. We have therefore selected sixteen examples to trace trajectories across histories and geographies of university architecture, examining how renowned architects have tackled this highly complex architectural and urban theme.

Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 1926

Function and form, structure and transparency, dynamic composition, these are only some of the key concepts historically used to describe Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus Building in Dessau. In this work, architecture was meant to embody the School’s ideology through its forms, materials, and the pioneering ways they were combined. The modernist, industrial aesthetic reflected not only a new visual language but also the paradigm shift in subjects and teaching methods within the Bauhaus School of Art and Design.

Campus Leonardo - Architecture by Gio Ponti, Piero Portaluppi and Giordano Forti, Vittoriano Viganò, RPBW, 1953 to present, Milan, Italy

The Leonardo Campus of the Politecnico di Milano is the result of a complex urban transformation process developed over several decades, with contributions from major Italian architects such as Gio Ponti, Piero Portaluppi, Vittoriano Viganò, and Renzo Piano. The heterogeneity of its buildings testifies to the evolution of both architectural typologies and university teaching methods, while revealing an ability to integrate harmoniously with the existing urban fabric, and at the same time, a desire to create new focal points for campus and neighborhood life. Each building asserts a clear and distinctive architectural identity.

Ingalls Rink by Eero Saarinen (1958); Art & Arch Building by Paul Rudolph (1963); Beinecke Rare Book Library by Gordon Bunshaft / SOM (1963), New Haven, CT, USA

Yale University hosts three icons of 20th-century architecture. Saarinen’s Ingalls Rink, one of America’s most beloved buildings, even appeared on the debated list of America’s Favorite Architecture. Paul Rudolph’s School of Art and Architecture (1963) stands as one of the earliest and most famous examples of American Brutalism. Though partially rebuilt after a fire, it has never lost what Nikolaus Pevsner described as its “oppressive monumentality.” 

Coeval to it, Gordon Bunshaft’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, designed at SOM, is a windowless suspended volume clad in translucent marble panels framed by gray granite, enclosing a glass-walled tower of books at its center.

Cambridge University, UK, 1968

A fusion of modernism and historical context: contrasting the surrounding neoclassical buildings, Stirling employed exposed concrete, brick, and glass on sharp volumes and surfaces, creating spaces of striking visual intensity. The large hall beneath the “triangular tent”, covered by a glass roof revealing its technological and mechanical systems, introduced a new spatial dimension to university architecture. In postwar Britain increasingly marked by Brutalism, Stirling’s building seems to anticipate the emerging high-tech trend that would shape European transformations from the 1970s onward.

Collegi universitari di Giancarlo De Carlo, 1962-1983, Urbino, Italy 

Set on the hill dominated by the former Capuchin convent, one kilometer from the historic center, Giancarlo De Carlo’s four university colleges were conceived as a small city-campus, his manifesto project and one of the most significant examples of Italian architecture in the 1970s. The overall design adopts a polycentric, cluster-like structure molded by the site’s morphology. De Carlo pursued a “naturalness of construction,” integrating volumes and terrain through slopes, roof gardens, and zenithal light, while avoiding repetition and experimenting with varied typologies. Material unity is ensured by the predominant use of brick, paired with exposed concrete for structural and projecting elements. At the heart of the project are collective, creative spaces intended to foster encounters and social interaction between students and citizens.

Iuav, Carlo Scarpa, 1966-1985, Venice, Italy

The Tolentini complex represents the historical seat of the university, housing administrative offices and the library. The entrance, based on a conceptual design by Carlo Scarpa, features the architect’s signature details, such as serrated moldings and dynamic sloping planes, and has become an emblem of IUAV itself. Like other works by the Venetian master, this project belongs to that category of architectures that rejuvenate historic buildings, creating unique spatial and expressive relationships between past and present.

University of São Paulo, 1969, São Paulo, Brazil 

A cornerstone of the Paulista School of Brutalism, the FAU-USP merges architectural form and pedagogical vision into a single civic organism. 

Raised on trapezoidal pilotis, its massive concrete volume opens up at the central atrium, a vast column-free space illuminated by a grid of skylights and domes. Around it unfolds a continuous sequence of classrooms, studios, library, and offices, connected by gently sloping ramps. Artigas envisioned the school as a public square of intellectual life, an open forum where space itself would encourage dialogue, collaboration, and democratic exchange.

University of Porto, 1987- 1995, Porto, Portugal

“The four imposing totemic figures that observe and control the territory” (Luca Gazzaniga, Domus 770, April 1995) have become one of the symbols of the “Porto School” and among Álvaro Siza’s most celebrated works. The pavilions, including the Carlos Ramos building, the first element of the Faculty, construct a sequence of solids and voids establishing morphological and topographical relationships with the banks of the Douro River. The clean volumes and the blend of traditional and modern materials give the complex a timeless character, in harmony with Siza’s vision of architecture as a form of cultural expression.

TU Delft, Delft, Netherlands, 1997

The Library at TU Delft resolves its relationship with the adjacent brutalist auditorium by designing a building that, from the outside, hardly looks like a building at all. A sloping grassy plane, high-tech underneath and green above, becomes a new fragment of the Dutch landscape, pierced by a monumental cone hovering above the vast interior below. Its forms and atmosphere echo illustrious precedents such as Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Library, works by Emilio Ambasz, and Gustav Peichl’s Kunsthalle in Bonn, resulting in a stimulating, contemporary space for study.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA, 2002

Designed to integrate work and recreation, Simmons Hall transforms university architecture into an exploration of the relationships between space and light. Described in Domus 858 as a “social condenser,” Carlo Ratti called it “this large, perforated building, somewhat like a gutted fractal sponge, faces Vassar Street and establishes a new landmark in the frayed urban landscape west of the campus”. Yehuda Safran drew a parallel with Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and La Tourette convent, observing how “the building establishes connections between semiotic chains, the organization of power and space and circumstances relative to arts, sciences and social differentiations that offer the student community a city segment to experiment with and to discover.” Indeed, the corridors spanning the building’s ten floors and 140 meters evoke urban atmospheres enriched by porous spatial morphologies.

China Academy of Fine Arts (CCA), Hangzhou, China, since 2002

A manifestation of art as a form of education, this project offered the architects an opportunity to design university life at multiple scales through architectural variations. Each building becomes an experience, inviting students to reflect on creativity and artistic expression, reinterpreting traditional ideas and elements, from the reuse of roof tiles to typological forms. Dynamic and modular volumes adapt to different teaching needs and to the surrounding landscape. Careful detailing and the use of natural materials seek a synthesis between functionality and inspiration.

Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China, 2004

An example of how architecture can interpret place and culture, this building for studios and exhibition spaces is defined by its essential form, built with local materials and traditional techniques reimagined in a contemporary key. To ensure natural light, the upper floors cantilever outward while the intermediate volumes recede, bringing in zenithal light.

Responding to Chongqing’s hot climate, the west and south façades adopt double, perforated walls that shade and ventilate the interiors. The rust-red finish recalls neighboring buildings, while exposed concrete maintains the tactile quality of traditional local plaster. Oxidized aluminum panels, crafted by students, enrich the façade texture. The use of inexpensive, locally sourced materials lends the building a raw yet solemn character, aligned with the experimental and artisanal spirit of the department.

Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCAD), Toronto, Canada, 2004

One of the most daring and iconic buildings in university architecture, the Sharp Centre suspends a brightly colored, sharply outlined parallelepiped above a pre-existing structure, a hallmark of Alsop’s playful formal research. Its vibrant palette and unconventional geometry make it a landmark not only for its function but also for its visual impact. Overlooking the adjacent urban park, the building acts as a device for observation, with its irregular windows framing an unexpected internal landscape.

New Bocconi Campus, Milan, Italy, Grafton Architects, 2008, and Sanaa, 2018

The last two decades of Bocconi’s expansion have seen the contribution of two Pritzker Prize–winning studios. For the sculptural extension by Grafton Architects, Domus 909 described a “new monument,” a project that “breaks in every direction the physical and conceptual barriers of the orthogonal cage in which their predecessor (Giuseppe Pagano) enclosed himself.” SANAA’s subsequent intervention adopts a completely different approach: curvilinear volumes and flowing roofs emphasize permeability and openness, capable, as written in Domus 965, of returning themselves “to the city as a playground, a space for imagination.”

Rpbw, Trentio, Italy, 2013

Emerging from the reconversion of a vast disused industrial area initiated in 2002, this project, completed in 2016, gave rise to a sustainable new district known as Le Albere, characterized by the integration of public, residential, cultural, and green spaces. Together with the MUSE, the Central University Library stands as the key node in an urban strategy reconnecting the city fabric with the Adige Valley landscape. Bright reading rooms, open shelving, transparent materials, and visual continuity with the surrounding scenery create an open, welcoming place for study, while tree-lined avenues, canals, porticoes, and green terraces enhance permeability and livability.

TU Delft, Delft, Netherlands, 2017

The Why Factory is a research and education center within the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology, directed by Winy Maas (Guest Editor of Domus in 2019). The institute explores contemporary cities by combining teaching with research on the analysis, theory, and design of future urban environments. Everything revolves around a central “tribune,” a multifunctional space designed to foster teaching, research, and informal collaboration: conference halls and classrooms on the ground floor, researchers’ offices above, and a meeting room at the top. With its iconic orange skin, the Tribune asserts The Why Factory’s autonomous identity within the campus, placing students physically and symbolically at the center, above their teachers.