LIUC-Università Cattaneo was created in 1989 by the convergent will of 300 entrepreneurs in the Province of Varese (UNIVA) and Alto Milanese to create a university economics-law-technology-science- and management, in order to prepare young people according to the real needs of the labor world.
It is the only Italian University, founded and directly managed by an entrepreneurial Association, created to provide training as close as possible to the demands of the business world and adapted to a local context characterized by a widespread presence of economic activities of small and medium-size, and several service functions to production companies. A new initiative, therefore, that aimed to fill a gap then present in the scenario of Italian education.
In October 1991, just 26 months after the project had begun, academic activities started, transforming LIUC into the seventh non-state universities present in Italy, the concrete expression of the need for strategic synergy between University, businesses, and the territory.
On the pathway accompanying LIUC, from its founding to the present, there has been for all the spirit of doing for the business community that gave the University life, a spirit that becomes knowledge and understanding. This pathway is, in turn, based on knowledge and know-how that, for LIUC, is an indispensable tool to create opportunities for growth and development for people. There is concrete evidence of the results achieved to date. After graduation and the results, the excellent rate of employability in terms of evaluation and merit reward the structure's didactic quality and excellence.
All this is not only a source of pride for what has been done so far but above all, motivation to continue to be a driving force, in which knowledge is born from dialogue, strong and constant, between the academic world and the world of work: to continue to be not only a school of I thought but also a workshop of doing.
LIUC was named after the great Lombard economist and thinker Carlo Cattaneo. They had the idea of combining the three elements of classical economics – raw material, labor, and capital – the intelligence and will of men, anticipating a problem and a need that characterizes the current production scenario, recognizing the entrepreneur's central role in the economic process.
The activity of company management, in fact, both in the managerial role and in the business, involves specific social responsibilities and requires a united learning process of the person.
"There is no work; there is no capital, that does not begin with an act of intelligence. With a closed circle of ideas, there also exists a closed circle of wealth". Social and cultural development, argued Cattaneo, necessarily passes with the development of ideas, skills, and practices that need to be part of the package of those who aspire to become rightfully part of the future class of leaders called to work in the business world where there are free professions and institutions.
LIUC is located within the historical structure of an industrial complex, the Cantoni cotton mill, Castellanza, itself a testimony to the entrepreneurial pioneering of the Olona valley, born around 1830, and that later became full of industry, unique in the area for its size and the fact that of being the first, united spinning and weaving, to reach several 1,500 workers, more than 1,350 of them operating functioning machine frames.
The high architectural and cultural value was applied in the restoration and rehabilitation of the former spinning workshop, commissioned by the Union of Industrialists of the Province of Varese. For an operation of recovery in continuity, the architect Aldo Rossi, the first Italian to win the Pritzker Prize for Architecture (1990), and theoretician of an innovative awareness of the city as a harmonic sum of all ages and all styles.
Combining the traditional spirit with the most innovative, in 1989, Aldo Rossi faced the recovery of the industrial area of the former "Cantoni" cotton mill, intending to turn it into the location of LIUC, reinterpreting the industrial buildings that are maintained and simultaneously redefined to qualify and represent the new character of the University and the spaces for the community.
The nineteenth-century factory thus became, in 1991, the home of LIUC-Università Cattaneo.
The covered area of the University is 68,000 square meters of classrooms with a total of3,000 seats, a lecture hall of more than 300 seats, five workshops, a library of 1,600 square meters with 100,000 volumes and a rich collection of periodicals, an auditorium with 100 seats, a large open space "café" dedicated to student activities, experiential workshops and home to numerous events.
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