Giancarlo De Carlo

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.

In 1976, De Carlo founded the ILAUD (International Laboratory of Architecture & Urban Design), based on the principles of Team X, which for 27 years took place every summer in Italy, in order to carry out continuous research in the evolution of architecture. In 1978, he founded and directed the magazine "Space and Society" which kept the network created by Team X active and guaranteed an alternative and independent voice in the European architectural sphere for the next 20 years.

Although his political beliefs have limited his portfolio of buildings, his ideas remained. From 1970 onward, he began building houses for workers in Terni, together with the workers and their families themselves. This was the first example of a participatory architecture in Italy, which turned out to be a success, being 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 1964, De Carlo was in charge of the first General Town Plan of the city of Urbino. From 1965 onward, he was in charge of designing the campus and facilities of the new University of Urbino. In the design, the campus is designed to merge with the existing hilly landscape. It was this project that saw him busy for many years of his life, and that gave him his first real 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".

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. It is a strong break with the old generation of architects and the myth of a unique international architectural model. Thus, in the 1956 congress, the end of the CIAM was marked with the start of Team 10, which brought together the new generation of architects (including De Carlo, Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, and Jacob Bakema) to conceive a new type of architecture, one which was better suited to local social and environmental conditions and where man "is not reduced to an abstract figure".

In 1955, De Carlo obtained a professorship in urban planning, which he maintained until 1983, coming into contact, and often clashing, with the major names in Italian architecture and urbanism such as Giuseppe Samonà, Carlo Scarpa, Bruno Zevi and Paolo Portoghesi. Between 1952 and 1960, De Carlo was part of the new generation invited to participate in the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

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 on 1 August of the following year (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 interest in man is not a priority, and urged the spectator to act personally.

Giancarlo De Carlo was born in Genoa, Liguria, in 1919. In 1939, he enrolled at the Milan Polytechnic, where he graduated in engineering in 1943. During the Second World War (WWII), he was enlisted as a naval officer. Following the armistice of 8 September 1943, he went into hiding, taking part in the Italian Resistance with the Movement of Proletarian Unity in which other Milanese architects such as Franco Albini also participated. Later, De Carlo organized an anarchist-libertarian partisan group in Milan (the Matteotti Brigades), together with Giuseppe Pagano.

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