The Domestic Turn: Politics of Education from New College to The Palazzo Della Sapienza

Student accommodation became a problem only a century after the foundation of the first universities in Europe in the 12th century. At the very beginning students had to provide their own lodgings autonomously. In many university cities the situation proved to be soon unsustainable. In the context of the gradual increase of scholars and thanks to the success of the ideology of charity, colleges were founded for facing part of the student housing question. While in origin, Popes, Emperors, and benefactors, saw education very close to monastic life, eager to shelter poor students and those with limited means, with the fall of the Middle Ages education became the realm of an exclusive elite. By focusing on two specific cases, New College at Oxford, founded and built in 1379 by William of Wykeham, and the Palazzo of Sapienza in Rome, designed two centuries later by Giacomo Della Porta—for many historian a design of Donato Bramante—this paper will try to show the gradual transformation that invested the problem of student housing between the 14th and the 16th century, in a process that could be described as a domestic turn in education. A typological shift from the large cloister-quadrangle to the palazzo-cortile (an architecture typically built for families), the ambiguity of the attempt in domesticating the piazza (typical of Bramantesque architecture) and institutionalizing the cortile in the form of the piazza, together with new policies on exams and pedagogy, more rules and disciplines, and the invention of urban strategies in the 1500s, were the vectors that carried forward this transformation.