EXPERIMENTS IN THICKNESS

What happens with architecture when its ideological raison d’être is depleted? Forever bound to Team 10 credos and identified with his political and social engagement, Giancarlo de Carlo (1919-2005) built relentlessly with good intentions for a society that believed in a better future. Among those projects is a development of an entire town of Urbino for the emerging student population. That time is no more, but the buildings are still there. Beyond the neoliberal revisionism and cynical moralism of our times, what remains is bare architecture, no longer celebrated, nor vilified. De Carlo's work in Urbino was our testbed for considering the aftermath of modernism. Picking up on the nuances of the polarised debate of the 1970s, it reveals De Carlo's own distancing from romanticised anarchy.