Abstract
Emerging out of post-war realism, crisis, and the collapse of ideals, Giancarlo De Carlo contributed significantly to the fragmented architectural discourse that marked the 1950s–1970s. His contributions took the form of activism. and included, the Exhibition of Spontaneous Architecture (1951), Urbino: The History of a City and Plans for its Development (1966), the manifesto, “An Architecture of Participation” (1969), ILAUD (1976), Space & Society (1978), and more importantly, his fifteen realized projects in Urbino, Italy between 1955 and his death in 2005. This paper opens a new line of inquiry––one that is distinct from De Carlo’s contributions to late-modernism and is inextricable from his patient search for an architecture that is rooted in the soils of the past. Within De Carlo’s built work, we discover certain mannerisms. Since the seminal work of Robert Venturi mannerism has reemerged in our vocabulary. No longer relegated to a set of stylistic attributes, it is understood as a mode of thinking and perception. Mannerism is better grasped as a body of tendencies that occur periodically across time. This paper explores De Carlo’s dialectics of opposites, fragments, and the “forked paths” of their interconnections. Beginning with contemporary research into the philosophy and architecture of mannerism, this paper focuses on the elements, and the spatial narratives present in several buildings that span his career. His architecture cannot be reduced to hollow gestures or signs. Rather, mannerism manifests itself as a mode of inquiry and method of design that is substrative to his discursive practice.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Architecture, Mannerism, Giancarlo De Carlo, Urbino, Narrative Space
