Lecture by Francesco Zuddas.

Francesco Zuddas, Unit Master and history and theory of architecture lecturer at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, will lecture on Monday 6 November at 5 pm.

The lecture is part of the University by Design event series — coproduced by the Architecture Programs of the Daniel and Gayle D’Aniello Syracuse University in Florence, California State University International Programs Italy and Kent State University Florence — which focuses on the topic of studying architecture abroad. This collaborative forum will consist of two public lectures aimed at reimagining the collective educational space and proposing innovative models for contemporary practice.

Francesco’s lecture will discuss the contested tension between concentration and dispersal as a constituent of university space that has marked its history from its origins to this day. It is by looking at such constituent that the role of universities as testing grounds for wider ideas of the city can be more fully appreciated. The lecture will consider some key moments in the development of ideas for the modern university between the 19th and 21st century that have been pivotal for developing responses, often contradictory to one another, to the urbanization of life.

Francesco Zuddas teaches architectural design and history and theory of architecture and urbanism at the Architectural Association in London. He is also an Associate Visiting Lecturer at the University of Greenwich and at Central Saint Martins in London. He previously held academic appointments in the UK at the Leeds School of Architecture and Anglia Ruskin University where he was Course Leader for the undergraduate degree program in Architecture. He started his academic career at Università degli Studi di Cagliari from which he graduated and received his PhD. In 2014 he was visiting research scholar at GSAPP, Columbia University, where he developed part of his research on the architecture and urbanism of universities. He has written widely on topics spanning postwar Italian urbanism and architecture, space and higher education, architectural pedagogy, and the spatial implications of changing production paradigms towards the knowledge economy. His current research is on student housing and the domesticity of student life, with particular focus on self-initiated cooperative experiments for student accommodation. He is the co-author of Territori della Conoscenza: Un Progetto per Cagliari e la sua Università (Quodlibet 2017, with Martino Tattara and Sabrina Puddu) and of Made in Taiwan: Architecture and Urbanism in the Innovation Economy (ListLab 2012, with Sabrina Puddu). His latest book is The University as a Settlement Principle: Territorialising Knowledge in Late 1960s Italy (Routledge, 2020).