Giancarlo De Carlo

Giancarlo De Carlo (12 December 1919 − 4 June 2005) was an Italian architect.

Giancarlo De Carlo was born in Genoa, Liguria in 1919.

He enrolled at the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1939 and graduated with a degree in engineering in 1943.

He then enlisted as a naval officer in World War II.

Following Italy's surrender to the Allied forces on September 8, 1943, he went into hiding, participating in the Italian Resistance through the Movement of Proletarian Unity alongside other Milanese architects such as Franco Albini.

Later, De Carlo and fellow architect Giuseppe Pagano organized an anarchist-libertarian partisan group in Milan, the Matteotti Brigades.

At the end of World War II, De Carlo publicized Le Corbusier in Milan and joined the anarchist movement, eventually participating in the first congress of the International of Anarchist Federations in Carrara.

During this period, he began collaborating with the anarchist magazine Volontà, where he promoted new social ideas for reconstruction and the incessant need for social housing.

In 1948, De Carlo resumed his studies at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (Università Iuav di Venezia) where he received his degree in architecture August 1, 1949.

In 1950, he opened his own studio in Milan.

In 1951, he organized an exhibition on spontaneous architecture and, three years later, presented three short films written with Elio Vittorini in which he denounced the drift towards a modern metropolis run by bureaucrats and technicians, in whom the interest in men is not a priority, and urged the spectator to act personally.

Between 1952 and 1960, De Carlo was part of the new generation invited to participate in the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

In 1955, De Carlo obtained a professorship in urban planning, which he maintained until 1983.

He often clashed with other prominent architects who worked in Italian architecture and urbanism such as Giuseppe Samonà, Carlo Scarpa, Bruno Zevi, and Paolo Portoghesi.

In 1956, as an Italian member of the CIAM, De Carlo presented his own project for a housing complex in Matera in which all the principles of le Corbusier are ignored at the expense of specific attention to the geographical, social and climatic context of the region.

His ideas were a strong break from the old generation of architects and the myth of a unique international architectural model.

In 1956, the current CIAM congress concluded and Team 10 began, bringing together a new generation of architects (including De Carlo, Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, and Jacob "Jaap" Bakema) to conceive a new type of architecture, one which was better suited to local social and environmental conditions and where the man "is not reduced to an abstract figure".

In 1964, De Carlo led the first General Town Plan of the city of Urbino.

From 1965 onward, he led the design process of the campus and facilities of the new University of Urbino.

The campus is designed to merge with the existing hilly landscape.

De Carlo's work on the University of Urbino campus design brought him international recognition.

During the 1968 movement in Italy, he sought a constructive dialogue with his students and published a series of texts and essays in which he theorized a more democratic and open "participatory architecture".

Libertarian socialism was the underlying force for all of De Carlo's planning and design.

He saw architecture as a consensus-based activity: his designs were generated as an expression of the forces that operate in a given context, including human, physical, cultural, and historical forces.

His ideas linked the CIAM ideals with the late twentieth-century reality.

Although his political beliefs limited his portfolio of buildings, his ideas remained.

From 1970 onward, he built houses for workers in Terni, together with the workers and their families.

This was the first example of participatory architecture in Italy; it was successful and was repeated with different results and procedures: in 1972 for the Rimini City Plan, and in 1979 for the recovery of Mazzorbo Island in Venice.

In 1976, De Carlo founded the ILAUD (International Laboratory of Architecture & Urban Design), based on the principles of Team 10, which took place every summer in Italy for 27 years, engaging in continuous research in the evolution of architecture.

In 1978, he founded and directed the magazine Space and Society to maintain the Team 10 network and guarantee an alternative and independent voice in the European architectural sphere for the next 20 years.

In Siena, De Carlo lead a project for the new suburb of San Miniato, which he criticized for its practical implementation (with its execution completed almost entirely by the municipality of Siena) and from which he dissociated himself later.

De Carlo was awarded the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1988 and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1993.

Several times he was invited to universities around the world for conferences and meetings, receiving numerous awards and recognitions.

De Carlo received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1995.

De Carlo died in Milan in 2005.