The Architecture of Participation (Insubordinations: Italian Radical Thought) - Softcover

Carlo, Giancarlo De; Corna, Luisa Lorenza

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262052687 ISBN 13: 9780262052689

Publisher: MIT Press, 2026

Synopsis

Seminal texts by renowned Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo on architecture, education, and anarchy.

Giancarlo De Carlo’s academic and professional career combined two seemingly opposed terms in a single vocation: architecture and anarchy. But this was a vocation that avoided the utopian fantasies of the 1960s and 1970s and instead strove for rigor. In the essays collected in this book, De Carlo shows how the idea of participatory architecture can open the way to a realistic, fully realizable utopia—in theory, but also in practice: in his urban planning of the city center of Rimini and in his architectural plan for the village of Matteotti in Terni.

“Architecture is too important to be left to architects,” De Carlo claims, and one of the fundamental questions this collection poses is: what is the role of the architect? Included here are De Carlo’s writings on the crisis of the university in the wake of student protests that anticipated not only the uprising of May 1968 but continue to speak to the crisis in the educational system today. His analysis of the “overturned pyramid” structure of the university still has resonance today, where everything is supported by the very thin tip of the academic body that relies not on the tensions, suggestions, and demands that come from below, but by the principle of authority—a structure that emphasizes the institutionalization and professionalization of education and scholarship rather than on alternative processes of learning.

Also included are De Carlo’s celebrated essays “Why/How to Construct School Buildings” and “Architecture’s Public,” which address the potential of architecture to translate and realize the issues that arise from the act of protest.

About this title

About the Author

Giancarlo De Carlo (1919-2005) was an architect and planner, educator and editor, writer and speaker, thinker and innovator. He was well-known in his native Italy and abroad as a founder of Team X and as a pioneer in participatory architecture.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262052687
• ISBN 13: 9780262052689
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280