Giancarlo De Carlo Trajectories

Sara Marini
Giancarlo De Carlo Trajectories

Keywords
Author, Project, Balance, Challenge, Journey

In 2005, Giancarlo De Carlo passed away. A naval officer, architect, engineer, professor, member of Team 10, founder of the International Laboratory of Architecture & Urban Design (ILAUD), director of the magazine ‘Space and Society’ and the editorial series ‘Struttura e forma urbana’, he was the author of numerous realised plans and projects, alongside proposals and architecture projects that remained on paper, as well as books and writings. He was, above all, allergic to labels and manifestos. Twenty years after his death, it is possible to examine in detail the many enduring directions this architect left behind. Simultaneously, one may observe the multiplication of trajectories as an approach. Here, the co-presence of them is sought as a modus operandi – a posture, a figure that releases discordant energies. This stellar imagery is based on actions such as: severing ties with the past, changing one’s mind, swimming against the current, relaunching towards the future, writing about doubts and failures, leaving incomplete traces for others to interpret, and, above all, remaining on the journey. Therefore, the aim is to celebrate the architect but also, by starting from the constellation of trajectories that he outlined, to reflect on the possibility of relaunching a vision of the project that is wide-ranging, multifaceted, and realised using diverse tools in various fields.

Giancarlo De Carlo
Opposite

Keywords
Physical Environment, Archetype, Intellectual Role, Contemporary Architecture, Urbanism

Short excerpt from Giancarlo De Carlo, Introduction to the Rensellaer Lecture, 1967, pp. 3-5. Università Iuav di Venezia, Archivio Progetti, De Carlo-scritti/086, NPR 041647.

Barbara Mander, Maria Cecilia Daniele
A House and a Vineyard. Participants

Keywords
Ca’ Romanino, House, Countryside, Giancarlo De Carlo, Livio Sichirollo

Ca’ Romanino, the country home near Urbino designed by Giancarlo De Carlo between 1966 and 1967 is home to a Foundation of the same name set up by Sonia Morra, which manages not only the space but also the life that animates it. Thanks to the Foundation, the house is a true locus of encounters and creative inspiration: it continues to live, hosting passers-by like a port. The owners have always lived in the house by sharing it and preserving the original spirit both of the place and the project. From the very outset, Ca’ Romanino has been more than just a dwelling: it has served as a crossroads of relationships and exchanges, a house-cenacle in which to continue exploring the spirits of architecture. The openness envisioned by De Carlo is thus guaranteed by the patrons as real hospitality toward the public, made possible by uses that reach beyond the private sphere. The space of the house may be offered to strangers, visitors from afar, friends or guests for temporary stays or study visits, to engage in writing, thinking, resting, or – once more – designing.

Emiliano Romagnoli
In the Metropolis. Riken Yamamoto’s Nishi Fire Station

Keywords
Specialised Architecture, Collective System, Space and Society, Contemporary City, Hiroshima

The Nishi Fire Station in Hiroshima, designed in 2000 by architect Riken Yamamoto, shows how the expansion of an ordinary dimension can also involve specialised structures, helping to free them from their customary isolation. A broader analysis of Yamamoto’s work reveals a method that, in line with a certain architectural culture, stems from a necessary rethinking of dwelling – understood not merely as the space enclosed within four domestic walls. The fire station thus appears, alongside other projects, as a threshold of intervention operating across different scales and spatial types, namely those that Yamamoto perceives within the contemporary city and within the one he continues to imagine.


Jacopo Ammendola
Restoring the Avant-garde. The Project by Sergison Bates of the Upper Lawn Pavilion

Keywords
Alison and Peter Smithson, New Brutalism, Heritage, Avant-garde, Solar Pavilion

In 2003, Sergison Bates were commissioned to restore the iconic Upper Lawn Pavilion, originally built by Alison and Peter Smithson for themselves and their family in 1959. The Pavilion, a brutalist icon of the As Found aesthetic, is in many ways a manifesto against preservation, posing complex challenges for the two British architects tasked with reinterpreting it. The intervention, famous as the invisible restoration, appears at first glance to be a purely conservative act, but upon closer inspection reveals itself as a critical and interpretative gesture that redefines the nature of the building. The Pavilion emerges as an open device, capable of embracing change and reflecting the transformations of time, sensibilities, and modes of inhabitation.

Giuseppe Longhi
Giancarlo De Carlo and The Architecture Machine Group

Keywords
Cybernetic, Participatory Design, Technology, Anthropocene, Age of Machines

The trajectories generated by Giancarlo De Carlo’s thought outline complex ecosystems shaped by the disruptive changes that have marked and continue to mark the current era. Among these is the emergence of a new geological era, the Anthropocene, marked by the great acceleration in human consumption of resources, particularly since the Second World War, within a system of relationships dominated by the emergence of new alphabets – with the rapid transition from the historical analogue alphabet to the binary digital one, a consequence of the cybernetic revolution, and now extending to current experiments with biologically based lexicons. De Carlo published in the series under his editorial direction “Struttura e forma urbana” for Il Saggiatore two texts produced by the Architecture Machine Group at MIT, Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander in 1967, and The Architecture Machine by Nicholas Negroponte in 1974, which addressed the impact of cybernetics on design practice. This essay thus builds on the direction traced by the two volumes reissued in the series edited by De Carlo and explores the evolution of cybernetic practices in the wake of the disruptive technological changes that have unfolded since the 1970s.


Federico Bilò
To Give Organization and Form to Space

Keywords
Process, Historical City, Team 10, Giancarlo De Carlo, Configurations

The terms in question are three: organisation, form, and space. Two of these are supported by the verb ‘to give’, which produces a transitive structure (give organisation, give form) and implies a deliberate, purposeful manipulation of the third term: space. The question arises: are these truly distinct activities? Is giving organisation genuinely separate from giving form? The contribution deals with the figure of Giancarlo De Carlo by highlighting the declinations and roles that the organization and configuration of space assume in the process of his architecture. By organisingspace, essential contents are conveyed in architectural products and, consequently, in the space of buildings, those that pertain to the anthropological register of space and the rejection of conventions. In a tension between architectural and urban portions, the essay highlights this basis of the notion of organisation, which imparts a particular tonality to buildings: the complexity of the historical city and its fabric are internalised and interpreted.


Sara Basso
Open University

Keywords
University, Disorder, Experience, Structure-form, Giancarlo De Carlo

In Giancarlo De Carlo’s constant search for a method – between theory and practical empiricism – to give form to his idea of architecture and urban planning, issues related to the university institution played a central role for him. Certain elements help to construct the background within which his critical stance on this theme progressively takes shape. Moving skilfully between research, design, and teaching, the architect developed his idea of the university over a rather long and intense period, which begins in the early 1950s – more precisely in 1952 – when, invited by Giuseppe Samonà, he begins teaching at IUAV.
The article explores three research trajectories to better understand the realistic utopia of a new university that the architect developed between the 1960s and 1970s. What emerges is the inherent complexity of a proposal that, going beyond morphological and typological formalizations, seeks to politically reposition the university within society, reclaiming its role as a public space for disseminating knowledge and perpetuating the search for fundamental values.


Luca Molinari
‘House and City-like’: Giancarlo De Carlo and the Team 10

Keywords
Team 10, ILAUD, Athens Charter, Social Infrastructure, Urbino

This article examines the initial and foundational phase of Giancarlo De Carlo’s international relationships covering the period up to the conclusion of the Team 10 experience. The final section is necessarily dedicated to the early years of the ILAUD workshops, which can be viewed as a continuation – albeit in new forms – of the intellectual impetus generated by the debates of the 1960s. What remains central is the strength of the theoretical and design discourse pursued by De Carlo, who sought to mediate between the structuralist conception of the city-machine – as elaborated by the Opbouw group on the basis of the Athens Charter – the urban legacy of Le Corbusier, and a more architectural interpretation of the urban project as proposed in the Northern European context, particularly by the Smithsons. At the nexus of this complex and necessary balance lies the human figure, in its physical and sensorial specificity beyond the abstraction of the Modulor, the human-centred idea of the ‘house of man’, and a diffuse form of humanism, articulated as a cultural and symbolic framework essential for the post-war reconstruction of Europe and the subsequent economic boom. In this vision, the idea of modernity itself is necessarily put into question in relation to the narratives, traditions, and stratified languages expressed by the existing landscape and historical context, while a renewed and active relationship between History and design practice appears indispensable.

Franco Bunčuga
Salt and Leaven

Keywords
Anarchism, Participatory Architecture, Carlo Doglio, Fabian movement, Pëtr Kropotkin

This essay explores the anarchic roots of Giancarlo De Carlo’s thinking and practice, as highlighted by Massimo Cacciari in his interpretation of the dialogue between architecture and participation. Although cautious about defining himself as an anarchist, for De Carlo, the principles of anarchism were an aim to achieve and an indispensable tool to guide his design practice. The result is a distinctive vision of his relationship with this current of thought, developed through his frequentation of Carlo Doglio and his reading of Kropotkin, in dialogue with William Morris, Patrick Geddes, and the Fabian tradition. This horizon informs architecture as an instrument of collective emancipation, based on participation, ethics, and social responsibility. One of the leading figures in the dramatic break with CIAM and a key member of Team 10, De Carlo remained throughout his life a loyal defender of the principles of rationalism and modern architecture; however, he never founded a school; there are no ‘Decarlians’. His legacy and influence – his seeds – have taken root over time through the work of ILAUD, the journal ‘spazio e società’, and the quality of his built projects: salt and leaven, still much needed today.


Alberto Ulisse
Counter-stories. The Catania Case

Keywords
Team 10, Restoration, Pre-existence, Aldo van Eyck, Giancarlo De Carlo

In a plural dimension of time, always linked to the recognition of a continuity between the cultural identities of places that transcend the distances marked by physical geography, Giancarlo De Carlo’s extensive work in Sicily, and particularly in Catania, can be reinterpreted. In the intersection between the urban and the human scale, De Carlo’s interventions are clearly recognisable and consistently directed towards a collective dimension of space (both internal and external), in a recurring dialogue between project and context, between identity and the rewriting of spaces, between volumes and new structures and articulations, between people and buildings. The project for the restoration of the Monastery of San Nicolò l’Arena in Catania fits into this continuity of intent. It spans much of the architect’s life and is informed by circumstances, facts, people, and the great complex of the former monastery. The intervention at the Benedictine monastery posed a significant challenge to De Carlo, bringing to light a familiar dimension made up of sounds, streets, and typical Mediterranean ways of living and thinking. These proved to be useful prerequisites for forging new relationships with the places and with some of the figures who, from that moment on, accompanied him on a project that spanned more than twenty years, and is still in the process of completion. These elements direct and, in some ways, condition the different rooms of the project.


Rajeev Kathpalia, Sandro Rolla
Giancarlo De Carlo and Balkrishna Doshi. A Dialogue

Keywords
Ethics, Participation, Space and Society, Pedagogy, ILAUD

In the post-war architectural debate, tensions emerged between modernist universalism and the need for local, participatory approaches. Within this context, Giancarlo De Carlo and Balkrishna Doshi stood out as figures who reinterpreted modernism through dialogue and engagement. De Carlo, a member of Team 10, promoted user participation, as in the colleges of Urbino case. Doshi, trained by Le Corbusier, redefined modernist principles through Indian traditions, as exemplified in Aranya Housing and Sangath. Their visions intersected in the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD), fostering a cross-cultural discourse. The ring reflects on their legacy through a dialogue between the authors, Sandro Rolla, formerly a student of De Carlo and Rajeev Kathpalia, partner architect in Doshi’s studio, showing how their work shaped architecture as an ethical, inclusive, and evolving practice.


Francesco Trovò
The Walkway and the Faraway Sea. The Blue Moon at the Lido di Venezia

Keywords
Giancarlo De Carlo, Adriatic Sea, Pier, Tourism, Architecture and Holidays

The Blue Moon complex on the Lido of Venice was completed in 2002, designed by Giancarlo De Carlo. One of its constitutional elements is the walkway that draws a trajectory towards the boundless horizon of the Adriatic Sea. De Carlo’s initial design envisaged that the walkway would extend two hundred metres into the sea, but in the version completed in 2002 it ends at the shoreline due to a range of factors, including construction costs, environmental concerns, and political considerations. The ring reconstructs the case of the seaside walkway, deemed of limited functionality by the concessionaires for beach use after 2019 yet of considerable importance for safeguarding the Blue Moon complex. What emerges is a confrontation between differing positions, resolved through the definition of values linked to the existing landscape-protection instruments rather than, contrary to expectation, the architectural-protection instruments, which are not applicable due to the building’s date.

Francesca Picchio, Silvia La Placa
Drawing Ideas

Keywords
Drawing, Digitalisation, University Building, Giancarlo De Carlo, University of Pavia

In October 1970 the Rector of the University of Pavia, Antonio Fornari, entrusted Giancarlo De Carlo with the task of constructing the headquarters for the scientific disciplines of the University of Pavia. In drawing up the development plan for the University, De Carlo found himself working in the north-western area of the city, the so-called Cravino district, in which the University had purchased numerous plots. While on the one hand the area offered freedom of expression and form in the design of new and specialised spaces and laboratories for scientific disciplines, on the other hand the need emerged to establish a connection with the historic centre and the humanities faculties. De Carlo opted for a multipolar model, designing a system in which the relationships between professors, students, companies, local businesses and citizens intersect in a continuous flow – moving between the central blocks (the main headquarter and that of Cravino), dedicated to teaching and research; the intermediate blocks, intended for services; and the peripheral blocks, conceived to concretely bring university activities into neighbourhoods in need of social revitalisation.


Mônica Graner
Maps, Telescopes, and Inverted Pyramids. Giancarlo De Carlo in South America

Keywords
Journey, Latin America, Modernism, Maps, Space and Society

The steps in the trajectory of Giancarlo De Carlo preserve the traces of all the cities he passed through. GDC is an itinerant traveller, not in a pleonastic sense, but in a poetic, intense, and hyperbolic one. His journeys comprise countless itineraries, often difficult to reconstruct – particularly those in South America, which took place between 1985 and 1994. Moreover, the multifaceted network of De Carlo’s relations expands in new directions through the creation of his non-identical twins: the ILAUD (International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design) and the journal ‘Space and Society’ – both characterised by a clear international vocation. His passage through Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile is marked by intellectual affinities, institutional exchanges, and presumably, personal interests. In these various South American contexts, De Carlo leaves fragmented traces – explicit, implicit, and silent. This reconstruction seeks to pull together the threads of his travels: published texts, photographs, drawings, and letters that bring the architect’s thought into dialogue with the South American culture.

Ina Macaione
In an Ancient Land. Giancarlo De Carlo in Matera

Keywords
Myth, Conflict, Living, CIAM, Team 10

What links three cities as far as Dubrovnik, Matera, and Otterlo? They are merged by a place of discussion: the CIAM; two generations of architects: the ‘28 generation’ (the founders of the Congrès) and the 56 generation (who in part will meet again in Team 10); a time: the years of the building designed by Giancarlo De Carlo in the Spine Bianche. These are years of upheaval. Europe must be refunded. The debate about architecture and town planning is intense, even if in conflict, in a back-and-forth between the realisations of post-war reconstruction and theoretical reflection. Among the topics discussed and the origin of positions that are often conflicting are those on the shape and habitat of the city. In the background was the dialectic crisis-continuity, autonomy-heteronomy of architecture. Contradictions that seemed to be issues of the moment, instead, represent in Italy an issue that has never been resolved in the academic debate from then to now. De Carlo tackles and overcomes these oppositions already with his House of Matera.


Francesco Maranelli
Notes on the Milanese Intermunicipal Plan

Keywords
Economic Miracle, Scientific project, City-region, Post-war Architecture, Giancarlo De Carlo

In the final stages of the ‘economic miracle’, the Milanese Intermunicipal Plan (PIM) was among the first Italian attempts at urban planning for the metropolitan region beyond the borders of single municipalities. The main theme was the ‘scientific’ project for the new great dimension of the city, the ‘city-region’, the post-war metropolis expanding into rural regions, sparked by the dispersal of energy sources and unprecedented development of automotive transport and telecommunication, which demanded new inter-municipal planning authorities. The anthology of theoretical-methodological, social, spatial, environmental, political and economic reports, collections of data, maps, and diagrams, in large number prepared by the Istituto Lombardo di Studi Economici e Sociali (ILSES), which constituted the first scheme for the PIM was presented by Giancarlo De Carlo, Silvano Tintori and Alessandro Tutino to an Assembly of Mayors from the Milan area in July 1963. Texts written by De Carlo in the years of the PIM highlighted three tightly related questions for a changing planning culture in the Italian Sixties: the aspirations for information-based ‘scientificity’, for participation, and for ‘openness’. In a time of radical transformations, these questions certainly concerned the technical tools of planning but were animated by strong political reasons.

Yasuo Watanabe con Francesca Rognoni
Through Memories. Japanese Glimmers in the Colleges of Urbino

Keywords
Giancarlo De Carlo, Urbino, Japanese Architecture, Fumihiko Maki, Collettive Dwelling

Between 1973 and 1975, Yasuo Watanabe oversee the design and construction of the Collegi Universitari Tridente, Aquilone e Serpentine in Urbino. Watanabe’s arrival at Giancarlo De Carlo’s studio was preceded by a letter from Fumihiko Maki, dated 24 July 1968, in which he asked his colleague to welcome into his studio the young architect, his collaborator, who is attending a Summer School. The collaboration continued until 1975, when the Watanabe returned to Japan to take up a teaching position at the Tokyo University of Science. Returning to Italy in 1977, together with other young collaborators of De Carlo – the architect Antonio Vecchi and the engineers Carlo Ripanti and Ernesto Olmeda – he founded the design firm Interstudio in Pesaro. The friendship with De Carlo, however, continued in the years that followed, to the extent that in 1986, for a presentation of his colleague’s projects in “Space Design”, De Carlo wrote a heartfelt introduction in which he emphasised that at the core of Watanabe’s work were specifically ‘communication spaces’, ‘streets’, and ‘squares intended for meeting and collective activities’. The Pesaro studio of ‘Nabe-san’ – as De Carlo often called him – preserves drawings, photographs, letters, and publications that recount the construction sites in Urbino, Maki, and the Genoese architect.

Ilaria La Corte
Tracing Giancarlo De Carlo in Portugal

Keywords
Portugal, Nuno Portas, Social Architecture, Habitat, Cluster

In the Portuguese context of architectural practice and criticism, Nuno Portas is regarded as one of the most insightful interpreters of the international debate on architecture and habitat. Placed at the core of his reflection, the latter is conceived in its multiple articulations, namely, it’s understood as a stratified palimpsest inscribed with collective memories, social relations, symbolic codes, and economic dynamics. This awareness underpins Portas’s analysis of modes of dwelling, carried out through careful observation of social practices and rejecting solutions that privilege form in favour of a methodology grounded in inquiry and open to contributions. The affinities between Portas and De Carlo lie in a shared critical terrain that questions the paradigms of the Modern Movement, advocating instead for an in-situ planning practice, rooted in local context, open to listening, and attentive to lived reality. This position finds theoretical systematisation in De Carlo’s An Architecture of Participation and concrete application in the Portuguese housing policies implemented from the 1970s onwards through the SAAL programme (Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local), one of the most innovative experiences in the field of social housing, centred on the direct involvement of inhabitants in the design and construction of residential spaces.


Nuno Portas
Social Housing. Proposal for the Methodology of its Architecture

Keywords
Portugal, Nuno Portas, Social Housing, habitat, SAAL

Translation edited by Ilaria La Corte of some excerpts from the typescript by Nuno Portas, presented for the CODA (public exam for the achievement of the architecture degree), in the Porto School of Fine Arts, in 1959, and entitled intitolato A Habitação Social. Proposta para a metodologia da sua arquitectura. .

Virginia De Jorge Huertas
Spontaneous Architecture. Giancarlo De Carlo at the IX Triennale

Keywords
Triennale di Milano, Architecture Exhibitions, Vernacular Architecture, Critical Regionalism, Cartography

The Exhibition of Architettura spontanea at the IX Triennale di Milano was organised in 1951 by a group of architects, geographers and other individuals with ties to a specific territory, including Giancarlo De Carlo, Ezio Cerutti, Giuseppe Samonà, Albe Steiner and Ettore Sottsass Jr. This diverse group presented a map of architecture without architects, an atlas of ‘popular architecture’ on the Italian peninsula. This contribution relates the work for the IX Triennale di Milano, reconstructing its events, with the critical texts in which De Carlo addresses the theme of ‘spontaneity’ in architecture. The Exhibition of Architettura spontanea thus proves to be a fundamental exhibition for understanding one of the many trajectories traced by De Carlo.


Tiziana Mattioli
Carlo Bo in Defense of the Architect

Keywords
Giancarlo De Carlo, Urbino, Client, University, Historical City

The words Carlo Bo dedicates to Giancarlo De Carlo forms a constellation of traces: they must be gathered and allowed to flourish in unexpected terrains – noble yet hidden. The only full-page portrait, a genuine token of friendship, first appears in 1964 in “Quaderni di Imago” and later, toward the end of his life, flows into Città dell’anima. That text is now available – on the twentieth anniversary of De Carlo’s passing – together with the remembrance the architect dedicates to his friend, the Rector, in the volume Un’amicizia feconda. This readily accessible material coexists, however, with more elusive pages devoted to the restoration of Palazzo Bonaventura – the first commission entrusted to De Carlo by Bo, on the suggestion of Elio Vittorini – which long remained concealed within the folds of seemingly demanding and inhospitable discourses: reports and narratives of everyday life concerning the administrative workings of a university. Carlo Bo’s words for Giancarlo De Carlo were in fact at spoken in the most appropriate place: it is that of the Discorsi rettorali (Rectoral Speeches) for the inauguration of each Academic Year, starting from De Carlo’s first visit to the town in the Marche region, at the beginning of 1951, through the 1950s and 1960s. On these institutional occasions Bo presented, recounted, defended against the most thoughtless and violent accusations the work of ‘his’ architect, perhaps as Federico da Montefeltro would have recounted and protected the work of ‘his’ Francesco di Giorgio Martini.


Elena Roccaro
Giancarlo De Carlo’s Anarchist Choreography. Mapping of an Horizon of Thought and Action

Keywords
Spatial Practices, Volontà, Carlo Doglio, Participation, Anarchist Publishing

The work of Giancarlo De Carlo always aimed to elevate the active forces of society, seeking to transform passive observers into active, participatory subjects with critical consciousness. This is exactly how the architect conceives anarchism, both as a tool and as a posture directed toward ideals and spaces that foster equality, solidarity, and freedom. Just as there are multiple anarchisms within the anarchist galaxy, De Carlo’s horizon of thought and action explodes into discordant trajectories. He consistently adopted, both in life and in his work, a posture of tension toward anarchism, activated as sensitivity, inclination, and modus operandi in his projects. Consequently, anarchism emerges not only as a political position but above all as a spatial practice: a way to design with rather than for, to subvert hierarchical dynamics, and to liberate form, space, and social relations. In this perspective, the study frames De Carlo’s work as a constellation of “anomalous choreographies,” wherein designing becomes a situated, emancipatory mode of critical engagement with reality.


Natalia Agati, Renzo Sgolacchia
Decoding Kalhesa. Architecture, Political Power, and Imagination

Keywords
Palermo, Giancarlo De Carlo, Pseudonomy, Adhocracy, Power Structures

Giancarlo De Carlo wrote Il progetto Kalhesa, a diary-like narrative revealing the political and bureaucratic entanglements faced during the urban regeneration plan for the historic centre of Palermo. Written under the pseudonym Ismé Gimdalcha, the book serves as a cryptographic text that criticises the collusion between architecture and power structures through an intricate use of anagrams, neologisms, and figures of speech. By decoding its language, the paper examines the reduction of architecture to ‘ideography’, emphasising the necessity of an alternative method of recovering a politically sensitive imagination to challenge bureaucratic paralysis: adhocracy.