Abstract

This article presents a close reading of Giancarlo De Carlo’s Ca’Romanino, specifically focusing on the percorso narrativo, a sequential route through the physical space along which events unfold. Its focus is on one of the only houses designed by the renowned Italian architect who is better known for his participation in Team 10, his advocacy and practice of participatory design, as well as his analytical approach to design, “reading the territory.” This diminutive work may be understood as a concretization of De Carlo’s fundamental approach to architectural design on par with Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Adolf Loos’s Steiner or Müller houses, or Robert Venturi’s house for his mother. While it is a relatively early work in De Carlo’s career, it is, nonetheless, a definitive statement that draws its substance from his earlier architectural work and writings, as well as his analytical study of Urbino. As such, Ca’Romanino occupies a critical position in his development as an architect and his search for an architecture that speaks a multiple language. This article follows the percorso, as it weaves through a series of Mannerist elements and unfolds into a spatial narrative in which tectonic form and material substance collude with intelligible references. The sequence of carefully articulated and positioned elements and spaces envelop the inhabitants in a larger discourse between architecture, society, memory, and, in particular, the mountainous environment of the countryside outside of Urbino, Italy. Although De Carlo was also a prolific writer and an educator, his concern was in the realm of practice, not theory. In Ca’Romanino, however, we discover an emerging theoretical foundation that becomes a touchstone and model for his subsequent practice.