Breaking Down the Silos. A hypothesis for Redesigning the Academic Spatial Environment to Encourage Interdisciplinary collaborations

Higher education plays a crucial role in addressing the demands of the modern knowledge economy and tackling complex societal challenges. These challenges, often referred to as “wicked problems,” require insights and expertise from multiple disciplines. Not only for addressing these challenges but also for enriching the processes of knowledge creation and innovation, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration within the institutions is essential. Architectural design can significantly contribute to facilitating the exchange of ideas and knowledge among people working on diverse disciplines within higher education campuses. This thesis will investigate how interdisciplinary collaboration can be encouraged in technical universities through spatial design. The objective is to design a project for a portion of the main engineering campus of Politecnico di Torino that proposes a hypothesis for redesigning the academic spatial environment to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. The first part of the thesis delves into the birth of the technical universities and the impact of the Industrial Revolution on shaping technical education and explains the rationale behind the mono-disciplinary design of technical universities’ spaces. The campuses of Politecnico di Torino were originally conceived as educational spaces dedicated to single-discipline instruction, which is a model that was also adopted by other technical higher education institutions. In the second part of the thesis, quantitative (size, users, uses, distribution, etc.) and qualitative (strengths, criticalities and weaknesses, future directions, etc.) evaluations about the campuses’ internal spaces and their organization are done. This study assess the aspects of campus design of Politecnico di Torino that present obstacles to interdisciplinary collaboration. The conclusions from this part are highly relevant for the architectural design proposal at the Politecnico di Torino campus, which will be unfolded in the last part of the thesis. The third part of the thesis proceeds by reviewing case studies such as the James H. Clark Center, Zollverein School of Management and Design, and the MIT Media Lab to demonstrate how architectural design may foster a culture of interdisciplinary learning and research. This research aims to identify and illustrate effective design strategies that are implemented to these buildings to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, which other academic institutions can adopt. The fourth and final part of the thesis draws upon the findings from the case studies, integrating the concepts articulated therein into the project and seeking to address the design obstacles to interdisciplinarity observed in the existing university spaces mentioned in the second part of the thesis.