Team 10 members present
Bibliography
Urbino, Siena, San Marino and Venice (Taly) 1974-2004
Giancarlo De Carlo and the International Laboratory
of Architecture and Urban Design
Introduction
In the mid-1970s Giancarlo De Carlo launched two parallel operations: on the
one hand he founded the magazine Spazio e Società, on the other he created
ILAUD (International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design), an international
workshop formed by a group of European and American universities. With these
two initiatives De Carlo sought to lay the foundations for a different approach
to architecture, one that would explore issues bound up with the territory,
participation, and reuse.
ILAUD (or ILA & UD), the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban
Design, was founded at the University of Urbino in 1974. The new ‘Laboratory’
concerned itself with the transformation of the physical environment; it sought
to promote research into new methods and techniques of design and to foster
contacts and cultural exchanges between teachers and students in different countries
and at different universities. The centre of its activities was to be Urbino
but there were also plans to travel to other cities. The official language was
English. The organization of its research provided for a series of permanent
activities, conducted at the various member universities through the year, and
a summer ‘laboratory’ or workshop, where teachers and students would
work on a series of thematic projects.
The Laboratory issued a ‘Bulletin’ to keep up contacts between the
different universities during the year and present the results of its research
projects and experiments. The first summer laboratory was held at Urbino in
September-October 1976, with the participation of students and teachers from
a number of universities (MIT, Barcelona, Zurich, Oslo, Louvain, Urbino). From
the year of its foundation down to 2003 the Laboratory was held each year, in
Urbino, Siena, Urbino again, San Marino, and from 1997 on in Venice. The members
of ILAUD totalled some thirty American and European universities, for varying
periods. The director of the Laboratory in all those years was De Carlo, assisted
by Connie Occhialini. In all, well over a thousand students, accompanied by
faculty members from the various universities, attended the Laboratory.
Though open to different opinions, varied and contrasting, the Laboratory had
a core group made up of members of Team 10. Candilis, Erskine, Van Eyck, Bakema,
Hertzberger and Pietilä all participated in various ways. But in reality
all of ILAUD’s activities turned on the constant presence of De Carlo,
as well as the equally constant but more unobtrusive work of Peter Smithson.
While De Carlo defined the major topics of discussion and research, Smithson
introduced a series of lateral approaches through the ‘lesser’ project
work on gateways, towers, paths, paving, minor buildings, trees and car parks
which he conducted at ILAUD every summer (down to 2002). Continuity with Team
10 was secured not only by the dialogue between De Carlo and Smithson but by
confirming its objectives and purposes. ILAUD was, in fact, De Carlo’s
version of Team 10, enlarged to include new voices, open to universities and
students, combining the moral legacy of CIAM and the energies of Team 10. Alison
Smithson herself pointed out the continuity between Team 10 and ILAUD, noting
that the enlarged circle of invitations to the Urbino meeting in 1966 could
be seen as a prelude to the subsequent foundation of ILAUD.
The constitution of a group always involves problems; above all in a case like
ILAUD, where De Carlo built a pluralist association with an open programme,
characterized by just one exclusion, formalism, and one objective, to develop
a new method of design open to the widest possible range of different interpretations.
The initial topics of participation and reuse suggested and developed by De
Carlo led in time to an emphasis on the activities of ‘reading’
and interpreting the physical environment. Though the group never went so far
as to provide a definition with fixed and stereotyped formulas and methods,
its special concern with ‘context’, understood in a very broad sense,
was one of ILAUD’s most interesting achievements. The method was based
on the premise that ‘the transformations of society leave unmistakable
marks in physical space’, while the term ‘reading’ was used
to mean ‘identifying the signs of physical space, extracting them from
its stratifications, interpreting them, ordering them and recomposing them in
systems that will be significant for us today.’
Naturally this type of reading ‘has to be carried out with a design-based
approach, so as to reveal the past and provide a glimpse of the future’.
To the complexity of the real world which it continually confronted, the Laboratory
responded with ‘tentative design’, design understood as the investigation
of multiple possibilities, and not directed at the production of specific architectural
‘objects’. ‘The project can thus be called ›tentative‹
in the sense that it seeks to achieve a solution through proceeding by trial
and error, but also in the sense that it probes the situation it confronts so
as to bring out its imbalances and understand how and to what extent it can
be changed, without being denatured, and so achieve a new state of equilibrium.’
ILAUD’s political and ideological presuppositions, formulated in the initial
statements of principle, sometimes resurfaced at conferences and discussions,
with the presence of anarchists such as Danilo Dolce and Colin Ward. But it
was De Carlo, with his address at the close of the Summer Laboratory in September
1991, who summed up ILAUD’s purposes, objectives and achievements. Discussing
the fall of the Berlin wall, De Carlo recalled his anarchist roots, his opposition
to all forms of exploitation, and observed with concern (he who had always opposed
‘the authoritarianism of the communist parties’) the passing away
of that ‘political passion’ defined as communism. Its demise, he
said, ‘will pave the way for social abuses and lead to the loss of political
freedoms won with hard struggles’. However, the demise of values and passions
led De Carlo to a renewed belief in architecture: ‘Precisely because the
world risks becoming mired ever more deeply in the crisis of values in which
it is already floundering, the only reliable frame of reference left is the
physical space of the territory. . . . In the territory humanity can continue
to find the signs of its past and the symptoms of its future.’
Mirko Zardini