 Giancarlo De Carlo. Inventario analitico dell'archivio edited by Francesco Samassa Paperback: 400 pages Publisher: Il Poligrafo, 2004 Language: Italian ISBN: 88 7115 356 1 Prize: € 30,00 Giancarlo De Carlo. Percorsi Pio Baldi: Foreword Memories: Critical essaies: Book presentation It was 1998 when Giancarlo De Carlo and the Project Archive at
the Venice School of Architecture (IUAV) defined an agreement and
a schedule of work with the objective of depositing, reorganizing,
preserving and making available De Carlo's professional archive.
This program involved more than five years' work and was finally
completed in June 2004 with the publication of the volume “Giancarlo
De Carlo - An Analytic Inventory of the Archive”, the third
in the series (after those dedicated to Giuseppe Torres and Alberto
and Giuseppe Samonà), included in the set of inventories
published by the Project Archive in Venice to give the public of
students and scholars of architecture the opportunity to access
the records preserved in the archive. First of all I should, however, state first two conditions that
constituted a limit to the operation. The first was the fact that
it was necessary to limit acquisition of documents that were no
longer of any operative usefulness for the study, at present in
full activity, so as to not to obstruct the work. This involved
the decision not to include in the work, for example, all those
projects that are so recent that they are still unfinished in all
phases of work (even if subsequent to the design stage in itself);
but also the rich photographic archive that is constantly used for
the many and varied publications that deal with De Carlo and his
work. Obviously this limitation is only temporary, and it is conceivable
that in future it will be superseded. A very different kind of limitation
however, and in this case unfortunately irreversible, is the result
of an episode in February 1972 (precisely documented) when De Carlo
personally destroyed a great deal of material in his archive at
that time, by "thinning out", or even eliminating completely,
the drawings relevant to the various projects he had worked on up
till that time (largely the "minor" projects, if we want
to accept a definition of this type, but it would have been important
to be able to study them today). This created a true gap, the only
really significant one in the record, that did not, however, cancel
all of the documentation of the work done by the firm before February
1972. The fund is organized in a sequence of four documentary series and in a sub-fund which in its turn is organized in three other documentary series: the series of “Acts”, two series dedicated to graphic materials (“Projects: drawings, reports, models” and “Projects: digital documents”), the series of the “Writings” and then, for the sub-fund dedicated to the architectural review “Space & Society”, a series of “Correspondence”, one of “Editorial Materials” and a last section of "Various Materials". The series of the “Acts” substantially collects all
of the materials related to correspondence produced in the context
of the many-sided work conducted over many years by Giancarlo De
Carlo: these range from his professional practice, naturally, to
his academic activities, publishing and his work of cultural promotion,
without overlooking an infinity of other occasional situations in
which De Carlo was involved in different ways. It amounts to a considerable
volume of documents, variously ordered in the different parts (and
substantially retaining its original organization), of great interest
both by the multiplicity of the authoritative interlocutors with
whom De Carlo kept up a steady correspondence, and by the attitude
(so typical of De Carlo) of treating his correspondence as an important
phase in the development of his thought. As an example I will only
mention the correspondence relative to the participation of De Carlo
as a member of the Board of the Milan Triennale down to 1968 (the
year of the ill-fated exhibition which he curated on the theme of
the “Big Number", which was devastated by demonstrators
on the opening day), or the rich correspondence related to the activity
of Team X, of which De Carlo was one of the most active members
as well as the organizer of two meetings at Urbino (1976) and Spoleto
(1976). Separate treatment is called for by the sub-fund of "Space & Society", the international review of architecture and urban planning which De Carlo founded and edited (from the 1970s down to its closure in 2000), since its materials have no direct relationship with the materials in the personal and professional funds. Though the premises of the editorial staff were set, except in the initial period, in the firm's offices, the review always had a life that was parallel with but independent of all of De Carlo's other activities. In this case the archive of the review has been acquired in the organization given it by Giuliana Baracco, De Carlo's lifelong companion and the energetic head of the magazine's editorial staff, and is divided into the three series mentioned above. One of “Correspondence” relates to all of the epistolary exchanges with authors, occasional contributors, but also the editorial staff; there are two of “Materials”: the first related to the preparatory materials of the different pamphlets (unfortunately they have been preserved only for the last twenty or so numbers of the magazine); a second one of "various" materials, here meaning photographic materials, press cuttings and other documentation that was collected and preserved as the review's "complex memory", a collection of notes and cues, the basic fuel for the discussions and ideas that animated the life of the review. As I have said, all the information regarding the documents extracted during the operations of reorganizing the archive is now available on line, and constitutes a fundamental instrument forcarrying out research into an outstandingly important figure such as Giancarlo De Carlo.
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