Chapter 1 of 24
Giancarlo de Carlo With Model Of Urbino
I am Italian and I was born in Genoa, but I lived in Genoa for a very short time. Then I went around with my family and I went in many different towns, and then I went in Tunisia, and then I came back to Italy. So I cannot say that I had a home town. In a way I am a cosmopolitan. And this is something I complain all my life, because I wanted to belong to a place, a specific place. At the same time, I think it was an advantage because I was always very curious of places and I try to understand places very deeply, you know, as in a wish of appropriating them. I didn't have a particular vocation to architecture when I was very young. And then close to the Second World War, I began to be interested in architecture, and I decided to be an architect, but at the same time there was the war. Even though I was anti-fascist I had to go to the war. But at the same time I became a member of the Underground organisation. As soon as the war was finished and fascism fell down, I became a Partisan. I'm saying that because I think it was important in my life, also it was important in my life as an architect, because in the Partisan period I got accustomed to decide upon values and especially also to know people, to know places very carefully, because it was dangerous not knowing places. And so it was important to understand everything, where you were and with whom you were. Then the war was finished in '45 and I immediately began to work as an architect and I went to other offices - as all young people do - I went in the office of Ignazio Gardella and Franco Albini, two distinguished architects. It was a period when to find work was very difficult and so it was a period of studies for me, and also I began to write something in architecture. I wrote a small book on Corbusier, a sort of collection of writings by Corbusier, a sort of collections of writings by Corbusier but very short writings with comments. And this was a component in my formation as an architect. But there was another component which was related to my formation again, to the studies of that period. I wrote a small book on William Morris, and I studied the period of William Morris and I studied also all that line of architecture which developed in England especially; which seemed to me at that time - and I keep considering it very important - something which was forgotten at a certain point but very important as one of the major lines, the more fruitful lines in architecture. So I got familiar with Patrick Geddes and also the knowledge or the familiarity with Patrick Geddes is still important to me. I've been working in observatories, you know, and also in an outlook tower recently for Siena which is certainly influenced you know by the work he was doing in Edinburgh.