This article was originally published in Domus 964 / December 2012

With the emergence of each new report on the state of Italian architecture, the country's universities are charged with contributing to Italy's failure to sustain and foster architectural culture. The problems are listed with implacable insistence: too many enrolments, which lower the credibility of qualifications; too many scattered campuses; provincialism and a lack of internationalisation; low student mobility; low research productivity; obsolete teaching bodies and the difficulties of renewing them; and paralysing comparisons with formerly virtuous national situations that were dominated by charismatic figures.

Now once again these shortcomings are being gauged, while the whole university system is subjected to legislative measures and government actions. Ongoing reforms compel universities to offer an overabundance of courses and to adopt new forms of organisation to improve integration between teaching and research. Meanwhile, a long-awaited government authority — the National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR) — is coming into action. This bridges a gap between Italy and other European nations, in an attempt to introduce a culture of quality based on clearly defined educational and research objectives, to be ascertained and monitored by self-evaluation. The agency's first actions aim to assess the state of research, while other measures will evaluate standards of university teaching. Their main effect so far has been to create an atmosphere of distress, concern and gloom, despite being an invitation to adopt a policy of fresh thinking and brighter plans. Moreover, these transformations are induced at the height of an epochal economic and moral crisis that also involves the meaning of the architect's profession and the effectiveness of design disciplines.

Looking at the past experiences of more than two decades, we find that attempts to reform Italy's university system have been concentrated on curbing its gigantism in the '70s and '80s. Standardised architecture faculties had fostered a generic attitude to anti-institutional criticism. As ephemeral containers, they had a very low didactic and disciplinary definition. But they exercised a strong appeal to the creative side of student populations, where the survival and construction of a formative path came about primarily by means of individual initiative.

From the early '90s, a number of reforms gave faculties a more disciplined and disciplinary image. The introduction of design workshops re-established a deep respect for practice. Workshop teaching reduced the student population, but not all that much, seeing as in the meantime study courses and campuses proliferated, a phenomenon related to the simultaneous reinforcement of the feudal system of sectored academic disciplines, each favouring its own corporatism to the detriment of the identity of architecture schools.

Although the faculties may not have been all that good at training architects, they were, in a sense, nonetheless effective in giving a general education to flexible graduates who could find jobs in the marketplace. This should be taken into account when redesigning the educational system, maybe also by offering students other, diversified learning processes. Some of these might be fairly loosely defined, others more authentically oriented towards the various fields of design and multimedia arts, without being conditioned by corporative academic thinking.

A comparison between the Italian situation and international scenarios reveals the following: abroad, some architecture schools are not part of the university system; sometimes a distinction is made between training architects who design and architects who are technicians; an architect's education can be understood in varying terms of professionalism; sometimes a relationship with the polytechnic tradition is favoured, and other times with the tradition of art colleges. We also learn that in some countries there is a sharp distinction between professors who teach architectural design and practising architects. Elsewhere, we see an absolute overlapping of professional architects from cultural elites and teaching professors, as, for example, in Spain (this is still an aspect of the Italian tradition, too, though to a less significant and more controlled extent).

It should be remembered that architecture, as a discipline with an uncertain scientific statute, must be reinvented continuously and its borders are ever in need of being redesigned. It is a discipline partly made up of rituals, beliefs, indeterminacies and epiphanies, one that can only be taught through indirect operations and in situations where knowledge is mostly gained outside or around the actual teaching. The construction of a study course must be directed towards a holistic scale of learning, together with the orchestration of its various phases and learning formats (lectures, individual study, seminars, long or intensive workshops, experimental workshops, exhibitions, discussions and conferences). More suited to the many demands of versatility, this form of teaching destructures traditional models of the atelier and lecturing; it is diversified and embraces methods with different durations and rhythms; and it also includes points of high emotional intensity. Furthermore, it implies dealing directly with the necessity for visionary qualities, all the while placing the accent on moments of concentration and isolation from the Internet.

A comprehensive teaching and research curriculum ought to include a variety of backgrounds of both teachers and students. It should be recognised, for example, that some teachers are better at theoretical teaching and design theory, others at pure research, and others still at passing down practical professional experience. Consequently, the management of academic quality should include the temporary recruitment of professionals and teachers from international situations, within the strategy of creating an open and dialogic cultural project.

Other considerations have a closer bearing on the Italian situation, such as the urgent need to rediscuss certain cultural paradigms related to the traditional Italian alliance between critical reflection and historiographic exercise. This would allow us to verify other self-analytical hypotheses that are more related to the procedures of design and more open to the imperfections of the real world. It would also be useful to ponder the advantages of studying in Italy, and turn architecture's relationship to the country, its cities and its problematic beauties into the kind of potential that determines a school's international positioning. What Italian themes and problems might therefore be of interest within a framework of international exchange?

This brings us back to the still moot point of what it means to conduct academic research in the field of architecture. The core issue remains the scientific indeterminateness of architecture and the anomalous character of its presence in the university system. Governing this condition essentially means defending a certain fragility that is quite potent in generating queries regarding the communicability of architectural wisdom.

Mario Lupano is Professor of Contemporary Architecture History at IUAV University in Venice. A scholar of Italian modernism, he examines the relations between the diverse expressions of architectural culture. He curated "Lo-Fi Architecture: architecture as curatorial practice", a project developed as an exhibition, a book (2010) and a series of ongoing events.