Exile and Resilience. Studies at the camp d’internement universitaire in Lausanne

The essay investigates the intellectual production developed by Italian refugees hosted in the military internment camp opened in Lausanne in January 1944 and active until the spring of 1945, when the refuges returned to Italy. In the complex and controversial Swiss system for housing exiles during the Second World War, the Lausanne camp provided an opportunity for young soldiers to continue their interrupted studies, and above all to renew their design culture in view of the imminent, difficult reconstruction, but also to develop close relations between Italian and Swiss designers. Directed by the scientist Gustavo Colonnetti, the camp was attended by teachers and students who would be the future Italian protagonists of the postwar reconstruction: among the engineers Renzo Zorzi, Aldo Favini, Franco Levi, among the architects Ernesto N. Rogers, Giulio Minoletti, Vico Magistretti... The didactics of the camp intertwined with the research conducted by the Centro Studi per l’edilizia and the Bollettino del Centro studi, established there, thus forming the precious legacy of a period of exile and rebirth.