Giancarlo De Carlo. a Symposium
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Plan Journal 5 (1): 261-278, 2020 doi: 10.15274/tpj.2020.05.01.2 Giancarlo De Carlo. A Symposium Sara Marini, Marko Pogacnik Conference Report / CRITICISM On December 10, 2019, a symposium on Giancarlo De Carlo (GDC) was held at IUAV [Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, Venice, Italy], curated by the authors. The IUAV University, the Department of Architecture and Arts, the Archivio Progetti – holder of the impressive collection relating to De Carlo’s works – the research infrastructure of IR.IDE (of the IUAV Department of Project Cultures), and the Venice chapter of the professional association of Architects, Planners, Landscape Architects, Preservationists of the Province of Venice collaborated to organize the meeting on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the important Italian architect. The symposium wanted to return to ongoing investigations into the work of GDC with the objective of opening up new research perspectives. De Carlo’s architecture is a multi-faceted field of work that offers today the possibility to reflect on the role of planners and on the tools at thier disposal to act in a deeply-changing reality. The ensemble of speeches went through the detailed framework of the methods used by a difficult-to-label author who intended to promote the project as a direct expression of an idea of society. The investigations into the correspondence of GDC, on the writings, preparatory and executed material in the IUAV Archivio Progetti and in other archives, the study of the references to the root of this thought, the direct or remote comparison, carried out through the architectures (also created with other authors), draw a wide field of research. The continuous revision of the critical and design tools utilised by GDC, his communication strategies, the connections between design, teaching and publishing are objects of study and possible research tracks yet to be developed. The published and unpublished documents were material for reflection and discussion, and also the realized architecture, on which we wanted to open a debate, not only raising 261 The Plan Journal 5 (1): 261-278, 2020 - doi: 10.15274/tpj.2020.05.01.2 www.theplanjournal.com awareness on them, but also about their protection and preservation. The symposium was divided into two sections: the first dedicated to the dialogues that GDC had woven into his various decades of activity with other cultural spheres involving design knowledge, such as philosophy, sociology, literature; the second dedicated to the methods and strategies of the Genoese architect and to the prospects that these may open up for contemporary design. Highlighted below are the key passages that emerged from the reports, the order of which follow that one of the presentations. DIALOGUES AND DISCUSSIONS GDC in Correspondence Marko Pogacnik, Professor of History of Architecture at IUAV, initially turned his attention to the critical reception of De Carlo’s work which had hitherto only focused only on individual segments of his biography or built architecture (Urbino, Terni, participation, ILAUD, etc.) without addressing De Carlo’s overall figure. Despite some important contributions in this direction (books by Lamberto Rossi, Benedict Zucchi and John McKean), there is still missing a monograph that describes the jagged path of his intellectual profile, investigating in particular, the moments of crisis. And it is into these moments that the seminar proposed some insights through the readings offered by both the speakers and the invited discussants. To simplify, we can divide De Carlo’s biography into three major periods, which emerge in the light of two moments of profound rethinking, represented first, by the unsuccessful conclusion of the 1968 Milan Triennale, and the second, by the dissolution of Team X, whose annual meetings stop in the early 1980s. After the failure of the XIV Milan Triennale, De Carlo abandoned Milan, which had been the city where he trained (with Giuseppe Pagano, Franco Albini, Piero Bottoni, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers, as well as the experience in the Movimento per gli Studi dell’Architettura), to begin a sort of internal exile that will bring him to Venice (where he taught from 1953 to 1983), to Urbino (a city that is “intertwined” with his biography) and Terni (where he realised one of the exemplary works on the theme of participatory design and planning). As also in the case of Siena, Rimini, Genoa or Pavia, De Carlo’s wandering translated into an interpretation of the role of the architect as an interpreter who conceives his professional role as a process of total identification with the city that is home to him/her at that moment. Each assignment, however limited, was an occasion to carry out that exercise of “reading,” and listening to, the urban context, that was the basis of his way of understanding the project. This idea of civil engagement attributed by De Carlo to the work of the architect is perhaps one of the reasons that led him to remain silent (with the exception of the Zigaina and Sichirollo Houses) about the numerous commissions for private houses 262 Giancarlo De Carlo. Sara Marini, Marko Pogacnik A Symposium Figure 1. Poster of the symposium on Giancarlo De Carlo, IUAV, December 10, 2019. he undertook over the years. On this aspect, our knowledge has been enriched thanks to the contribution by Francesco Ceccarelli, invited as a discussant, who still lives in the house built by De Carlo for his father on the hills overlooking Bologna. In the late ‘70s, an extremely productive period, De Carlo began to rethink the foundations of his own language and new themes were added to his work: the idea of breaking free from the constraints of a positivist conception of the structure of a building and the pleasure of studying the effects of a more complex geometry at the basis of the project. From this new phase of his work, there were projects that bear witness, such as the staircase of the Palazzo degli Anziani in Ancona, and the Outlook Tower in Siena, and works such as Blue Moon of the Lido in Venice, and the gateways of San Marino, works on which criticism has until now been expressed with great reservations. De Carlo evoked the image of the relationship between a tree and the creeper that climbs its trunk: “I know very well that it is the tree that holds the creeper up, but you could also look at the creeper from another perspective, as if it had collaborated. And then everything changes.” 1 De Carlo was interested in the relationship between the science and the art of construction, entropy, fractals, the theories of chaos, and on these themes the symposium was able to hear the testimony of another discussant, engineer Giuseppe Carniello, who was his collaborator in the early ‘80s on projects such as the gateways of San Marino. 263 The Plan Journal 5 (1): 261-278, 2020 - doi: 10.15274/tpj.2020.05.01.2 www.theplanjournal.com Having made this long introduction, it is time to return to the theme selected for the first part of the symposium, that of dialogue and discussion, a key to the reading that was interpreted by Pogacnik through the important correspondence of the architect held at the IUAV Archivio Progetti. The epistolary dialogue documents the extensive network of friendships and relationships that Giancarlo De Carlo was able to weave during his long activity. His personal correspondence alone amounts to more than 2,000 papers, to which must be added – because they are ordered separately – the letters relating to his professional work, those written as Editor-in- Chief of Spazio e Società / Space & Society (1978-2001), and, lastly, the correspondence for ILAUD (International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design) - the international school which he directed from 1976 to 2003. To this already significant body of work must be added the correspondence as a member of the MSA (Movimento di Studi per l’Architettura, of which he was Director from 1955 to 1957, a period that coincides with his activity as associate editor at Casabella - Continuità) and of Team X (from the CIAM meeting in Otterlo in 1959 until its disbandment in 1981). Personal correspondence alone documents the exchange of letters with nearly five hundred and thirty correspondents in a time span from 1957 to 1999. The study of this material has only just begun and of this, it was only possible to give an account through a survey limited to some protagonists (Aldo Rossi, Francesco Dal Co, Denys Lasdun, Giorgio Macchi, Renzo Piano and Bruno Zevi), a survey that, in this seminar, could only briefly illustrate the last of the mentioned figures, Bruno Zevi. The first letter preserved in the Archive dates back to 1963, the one with which Zevi took his leave from Venice to take up the Chair of History at the University of Rome. De Carlo imprinted his dialogue with his interlocutors by making use of every possible rhetorical device, from harsh accusation to an attempt at explicit seduction, and these different methods were all used in the correspondence with Zevi. Their acquaintance dated back to the years in which the MSA collaborated with the APAO (Associazione per l’architettura organica – Association for Organic Architecture) in an attempt to address the architectural debate that was then developed in magazines such as Metron, Comunità, Casabella and then L’architettura. De Carlo saw in Zevi the figure of a protagonist capable of exercising considerable power thanks to his international relations (with America, UNESCO, and other academic institutions) as well as his position in Italy - Secretary of the INU (Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica – National Institute for Urbanism), strong relationships with the publishing world, and jury member in many architectural design competitions.