The design dimension of the Student Social Housing: New approaches for the changing European city

The university residence as a design theme is today in the centre of a renewed scenario of reflections due to a change not only in the architectural paradigms (increasingly integrated with the urban context) but also with reference to the users’ ways of use, no longer limited to the student population but extended to other more and more different categories. In this context, the design of furnishing elements (relating to both accommodation and common spaces), after a long period of undoubted marginality, is now experiencing renewed interest as a result of both the need to increase the quality levels of university residences in their complex, and of the awareness of the contribution that design can provide with respect to the needs of modifiability, adaptability and flexibility which have now become essential. If the now consolidated trend (also implemented by the regulatory system with very culturally advanced laws and decrees) is to overcome models that respond to merely demanding and quantitative requests, the approach to design strategies not only recognizes design's ability to contribute to improve the quality standards of university residences, but also borrows themes and issues that have always characterized the discipline itself; among these: sustainable production, recovery of material culture, process innovation, attention to materials and components’ life cycle, cost-effectiveness, social relationship between individual dimension and collective dimension of the solutions. Thus, the reconstruction of a continuity with the great design masters’ experiences of the past century appears possible today, just as the reconstruction of the relationship between user, object, space and architecture becomes possible and necessary.