Abstract
This paper presents a series of lessons that unfold from a close-reading of the percorso narrativo in Giancarlo De Carlo’s Ca’ Romanino. Its focus is on one of the only houses designed by the renowned Italian architect who is better known for his participation in Team 10, his advocacy and practice of participatory design as well as his analytical approach to design, “reading the territory.” This diminutive work may be understood as a complex examination of De Carlo’s fundamental approach to architectural design on par with Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy, Adolf Loos’s Steiner or Müller houses, or Robert Venturi’s house for his mother. While it is a relatively early work in De Carlo’s oeuvre, it is, nonetheless, a definitive statement. This paper is structured around the unfolding of Ca’ Romanino’s architectural discourse on the elements, principles, and place-based approach to spatial organization. The sequence of carefully articulated elements and spaces form into a narrative that weaves the inhabitants into larger cultural and social discourses while placing them in the mountainous environment of the countryside outside of Urbino, Italy. Although De Carlo was also a prolific writer and as well as an educator, his concern was in the realm of practice, not theory. In Ca’ Romanino, however, we discover an emerging theoretical discourse between architecture, society, place, and memory.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Giancarlo De Carlo, Ca' Romanino, Space, Memory, Society
