When observed form the sky it is not difficult to see how the Padan territory, among the other Italian regions, is the most marked by the Roman colonisation matrixes. Centurian traces, originated form Via Emilia as the Decumanus Maximus, still survive as a precise and recognisable plot, which has been transported from an agrarian order to a road and urban order. Inside this web, Parma’s southern country is distinguished for its canals and agrarian borderlines. The project area, located between Via Langhirano and the University’s Campus, is in this way emblematic: a big rectangle with its longer side parallel to Via Emilia, first Roman axis towards the conquest of the European lands.
On the groove of this historical trace of settlement, the foundation of the project itself for the new School for Europe, a big spine, developed as a long cloister, sustains a unitarian territorial approach which finds in the next scale of several courtyards’ combination the needed development to the functional integration of the different grades of education and the relative facilities.
At the last is the portico on the facade towards the city, as well as the ones in the main cloister and in the courtyards facing the planted green, that becomes the mediation and distribution component of the composition, able to fix and relate the place of education, the city and what remains of the farmland. So the European School overlooks towards the city from the main portico with a unitary image, while a strict autonomy develops internally and in the big porticoed courtyards of the scholastic single units, disposed on the sides of the cloister, defined by a body of a different length, extended toward the green.
The courtyards’ phalanxes slowly empty and dematerialise in the architecture/nature system, defining themselves as protected islands of relationship, study and games. Three absolute architectural and typological elements assumed on different scales, the cloister, the courtyards and the porticos, linked with the waterline, define a landscape project, expressing the identity of the place and its contemporary transmission in a European horizon.
