Giancarlo De Carlo died on the 4th of June 2005. Naturally Isabel Allen, then editor of the AJ, instantly commissioned me to go to Urbino to make a quick record (We did that kind of thing in those days). It has left an impression that will last a lifetime.
De Carlo stands as one of the most lucid and unflinching voices in twentieth-century architecture. His work is not easily confined to the realm of form and construction; it was always, first and foremost, political. From his early involvement in the Italian Resistance to his lifelong advocacy of anarchist and libertarian ideals, De Carlo viewed architecture as inseparable from society, a discipline that could only be legitimate if it served and reflected the communities it touched.
A central figure in the transition from the dogmas of CIAM to the more open, socially engaged debates of Team 10, De Carlo questioned the universality of the modernist project and argued instead for architecture rooted in geography, history, culture, and above all, people. His rejection of abstraction in favour of lived experience is nowhere clearer than in his master plan and architectural interventions at Urbino, where careful insertions and sensitive urban strategies unfolded over decades, continuously responding to the evolving needs of the community.
De Carlo’s radicalism was not rhetorical. At Terni, in the housing for steel workers, he insisted that workers be paid to participate in design meetings and that management be excluded, thereby protecting the authenticity of their contribution. Such processes were more than consultation; they were acts of solidarity and education, recasting the architect as mediator and facilitator rather than master.
His writings, such as the seminal essay Architecture’s Public (1969), crystallised his belief that buildings are never autonomous objects but part of a broader conversation with their users, their contexts, and their times. Through the journal Spazio e Società and the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD), De Carlo created international platforms to sustain critical exchange and resist the commodification of architecture into imagery and spectacle.
In his critique of postmodernism and the celebration of the “commercial vernacular,” he warned against architecture’s complicity in normalising the more corrosive tendencies of capitalist culture. For him, disorder was not an aesthetic choice but a social condition that could only emerge authentically when communities expressed themselves freely, outside the strictures of imposed order.
De Carlo’s long relationship with Urbino remains his enduring legacy: an evolving, interdisciplinary project that married heritage with innovation, and that framed architecture as an instrument of dialogue. His life and work remind us that design is never neutral. To build is to take a position, on society, on power, on how we live together.
