The Space of Analogy, Distortion, and Reflection

Emerging out of postwar 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), International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) (1976), Space & Society (1978), and more importantly, his fifteen realized projects in Urbino, Italy, between 1955 and his death in 2005. This article 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 article 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 article 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.