Faculty of Law - Former convent of Sant'Agostino

"The Faculty of Law, whose works are carried out between 1966 and '68, is the first intervention for the expansion of the University thanks to the reuse of the city's historic buildings, in this complex, which in the past was the first convent from the 18th century and then, after 1850, adapted to an orphanage, Giancarlo De Carlo developed his idea of ​​recontextualization of an architecture by eliminating those parts added over time and starting from the original dimension of the monastic structure. of new use of space, we see that he re-qualifies the environments with the firm will, as he once said about his intervention on buildings of the past, "to restructure it in a new context of meanings that I consider relevant for my time".

The entrance, discreet and composed behind that marked linearity of the sliding door and the three window slits, accentuates its sobriety hidden by the walled court, as if it were a hanging garden of a private home, but, beyond the threshold of the entrance to the courtyard, instead, a narrow street is piled up by the domes of the skylights of the reading room below, which oblige a change of direction at every step. This "clash" with architecture is essential in De Carlo, since the quality of a shape qualifies in the activity for which an environment has been designed.

His willingness to change is also underlined by the indications that the teachers provided him for a better educational activity and that come to life in the pre-existing premises as well as those specially created by him. Kidnapped by the inventions of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, which he always explicitly considered a master in creating spaces, De Carlo conceives the rooms of the Faculty through a strong emphasis on materials, as shown in the library the combination of the original brick with the cement of the staircase created by him; but also through that light that becomes substance, both present and silent, both in the Great Hall, as in the reading room and in the skylight above the main staircase. "