Marco De Michelis has been teaching History of Architecture at the Department of Architectural History of the IUAV University of Venice since 1973. Since 1999, he has served as the dean of the Faculty of Design and Arts/IUAV and has been a member of the teaching staff of the Ph.D. program in architectural history since its foundation. He represents IUAV on the Academic Council of Venice International University. He has given lectures and participated in seminars and conferences at some of the most prominent universities in Europe and the USA.

In this speech, De Michelis talks about the interdisciplinarity of the arts in contemporary age: from the fusion of the arts with the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) developed by Wagner during the first half of the Nineteenth century, to the trans-disciplinarity of the Fifties and the Sixties, when, in order to set the boundaries of its areas of competence, arts take up other fields of interest.