Giancarlo De Carlo: layered places.

GIANCARLO DE CARLO: LAYERED PLACES

By John McKean. Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2004. [euro]78

GIANCARLO DE CARLO: INVENTARIO ANALYTICO DELL'ARCHITETTO

Edited by Francesco Samassa & Anna Tonicello. Padua: II Poligrafo (2 vols. with English translation). 2004

Giancarlo De Carlo (b1919) has enjoyed an extraordinarily long and productive career, as architect/planner, as writer/editor and as teacher at ILAUD, his private summer school. He was a leading figure in Team X, and an early and merciless critic of CIAM and the excesses of the Modern Movement. By the end of the 1960s he had become a key figure in participation, both theory and practice, and he pursued a kind of critical regionalism twenty years before Ken Frampton coined the term.

While other cities across Europe were carelessly disembowelled, he spent decades sensitively replanning Urbino, showing how history and modern life could be reconciled. His conversions there count among the best new/old schemes of the twentieth century, and his new-build Collegio del Colle remains one of the key works internationally from the 1960s. Since then he has continued tirelessly to build, write and teach. These two new books round off the oeuvre in different ways. The Italian one marks the reception of the De Carlo archive at the University of Venice under the leadership of Francesco Samassa. Its two economical paperback volumes amount together to some 800 pages (Italian and English parallel texts), one of which lists and partly illustrates the contents of the archive while the other contains essays about life and work by Samassa, Pio Baldi, Roberto Sordina, Paolo Ceccarelli, Donlyn Lyndon, Franco Purini, Giorgio Giucci and myself. As a contributor I forbear to review it, but will confess to pleasant surprise at the consistency of view between authors. The archive volume will be an essential tool and first port of call for any serious student of De Carlo.

John McKean's monograph coincided luckily with the Pompidou exhibition on De Carlo's work and serves as its catalogue. Large format and 208 pages allow space for a good selection of drawings and photographs, some in colour, while design and production follow Menges's usual impeccable standards. McKean has followed De Carlo's career closely for the last twenty years and taken part in various of the ILAUD summer schools, so he is a well-informed and sympathetic advocate. His chapters alternate discussion of historical and theoretical issues with chronologically organized descriptions of the work. A fairly full and rounded picture emerges, but coverage of the buildings is somewhat concise, and the choice of a few key images for each (only one floor plan of the great Magistero, for example) restricts the possibility of full imaginary exploration. What does come across, though, is the extraordinary range of work, and it is painful to register the density of unbuilt, delayed and compromised projects. What might have been! McKean suggests in the opening pages of this book that the man has yet to be given his due, and many slighter figures are certainly better known. Perhaps this is because architects and commentators have found De Carlo's style--if one can so call it too puzzlingly changeable, while critics have resented his poaching on their territory, arguing back instead of showing proper gratitude for their support. But there is also the problem that his work is highly specific and needs to be understood in its own terms, in close relation to place and purpose and with knowledge of its aims.

De Carlo has provided no simple formula for easy emulation, and though his influence is great, he leaves no school. An anarchic distrust of institutions and a demand for political independence have made him both an outsider and a beacon of unimpeachable integrity in a country notorious for its mutual back-scratching. McKean is at his best when setting De Carlo in his historical context among peers and rivals, teasing out the development and exchange of ideas with the help of well-chosen quotations from De Carlo and others. Particularly good are the chapters on 'Reading places' and 'Risking professional disorder', which reflect areas of concern as relevant today as ever. The first addresses the question of how to preserve, respect or regenerate genius loci under fast changing conditions.

The point is that 'reading' and design are but two sides of the same coin, involving the identification of layers in the palimpsest before overwriting can take place. The second concerns the issue of how to ameliorate the expropriation of ordinary people from decisions about their environment, which has bred indifference and alienation in a vicious circle, divorcing architecture from its public. Neither of these matters is of much concern to the strutting and preening stars on today's international architects' catwalk, but both will need attention long after the lights are out and everyone has gone home.