Cultural Goals
The Scuola Superiore Europea di Architettura Urbana is an international postgraduate research and teaching academy. Its object is to promote a rigorous approach to the analysis, design and building of contemporary cities. Urban architecture, as theory, may be regarded as a number of transmittable processes inferred from the past and applicable to the contemporary world. The specific nature of urban design, as practice, lies in its being a system of relations between the parts rather than the definition of a part in itself; it is the privilege of complex simplicity rather than of ordinary complexity: and its craft is inevitably rooted in the city itself. Every city represents a grand architectural treatise. But every city is also a large-scale manual of solutions available for critical consultation by architects in the day-to-day practice of their profession. It is therefore necessary to study deeply the complex, stratified readings of the contemporary city, so that its historical and material physicality, dimensions, forms and types, that is to say every major aspect of the urban situation to be approached, can be thoroughly grasped. Identity includes such major elements as: work consistent with context; the congruous choice of materials to suit construction techniques, the appropriateness of dimensional and proportional relations between parts and the whole; and the conformity of architectural language to the civic and public characteristics of urban architecture. These identifying characteristics should be expressed by the architectural work on any urban site to be completed or converted, be it historically consolidated or recently built. The Scuola has set itself the cultural target of reconstructing and pursuing a methodology of architectural design to supersede the kind of (pseudo)creative individualism that contradicts the objective, collective and shared construction of the forma urbis and of urban architecture. The Scuola Superiore Europea di Architettura Urbana, based in Naples, has inherited a conspicuous store of experience and international exchanges from the International Architectural Design Seminars “Naples, architecture and city”, held from 1989 to 1998. It is thus an entirely new cultural institution, ready to face the innumerable challenges posed by the globalized society of the new millennium. Moreover, the Scuola aims to occupy a simultaneously central and far-reaching position within the European cultural panorama: central to the international architectural debate; and far-reaching through its link with the four cities around which its teaching and research will orbit: Naples, Barcelona, Berlin and Zurich. Corresponding to these European cities are Uberto Siola, Eduard Bru, Hans Kollhoff and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Headmasters of the Scuola Superiore Europea di Architettura Urbana.

For the academic year 2006-2007 the School activates the Course of High Education (annual) in Architecture and Urban Studies and the Course of scientific post-graduate specialization (triennial) in Architecture and Urban Studies.
This second Diploma is recognized equivalent, at request of the part, to the doctor’s degree issued by Italian Universities (D.M. of the 14.07. 2006 / Official Gazette sg. 176 of 31.7.2006)

INFO
Fondazione Internazionale per gli Studi Superiori di Architettura
Tel. + 39 081 664282
e-mail: b.carrano@fondarch.it