The Ruins of Education

This article focuses on two architectures designed for education: Vittoriano Viganò's Marchiondi Spagliardi Institute in Milan and Luigi Pellegrin's Marchesi Institute in Pisa. Zevi commented on these works in several texts.Zevi appreciated the sense of freedom that Viganò managed to convey in a building for re-education, until then almost always associated with structures conceived as prisons. His interpretation focuses primarily on the social and political dimensions of the project. It was Zevi himself who named Pellegrin the winner of the international competition for the Marchesi complex. The project's human dimension and its constant outward thrust are highly valued by the historian. Pellegrin's work, in the context of the numerous research conducted between the 1960s and 1970s, presents a concrete political response that takes into account both the demands of the student movement and the local needs of citizens. Both works were born from the belief that they could transform the school, society, and both, like other architecture of the same period, ended up extinguishing their enthusiasm in the fumes of that same flame. Their impulses for change, however, met with a lukewarm reception from their users. The enthusiasm in transforming a manifesto into a building, and the congenital delay of architecture in conveying messages to society, immediately encountered widespread resistance: from the students' parents and administrators, with regard to Pellegrin's architecture, and from those who should have embraced the work's progressive demands, in Viganò's building. The theoretical framework of both works was likely already crumbling even as construction work had yet to conclude, giving rise to buildings that spoke languages that were by then contested and outdated. The militant spirit that Zevi admires in those buildings ends up clashing harshly with a society that over the years has stopped seeking ideologies, clinging to reality to heal the wounds of utopias.