An Architecture of Loss. Life, Nature and Politics in Giancarlo De Carlo's Drawings

In an Interview, renowned Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo underlined the importance of drawing for his architectural thought and practice by declaring “that without the closest complicity between the intellect and the hands […] one does not achieve architecture.” (2018: 227). We wish to interrogate this complicity by focusing on De Carlo’s somewhat understudied drawings like, for example, his sketches of Olympia and Bassae (Greece) or those for Siena’s Outlook Tower. Our hypothesis is that De Carlo’s sketches represent a peculiar locus to grasp the ways in which his ideas intertwine with his architectural practice. Following De Carlo’s lead—who suggested that to understand his political ideas one would have to “superimpose” life with architecture (2018: 209)—we will read his sketches as the physical convergence between an idea of what life is (or should be) and architecture. Our graphological study of De Carlo’s sketches is aimed at understanding what this convergence meant for him. More precisely, we want to tackle three fundamental questions seldom addressed by commentators, like Manfredo Tafuri (1989) or John McKean (2004), who stress the importance of anarchism for De Carlo’s oeuvre: what kind of anarchism was he affirming when he declared to be an anarchist? How exactly did this anarchism inform his understanding of architecture and its role with regards to the environment? Can we glean such an anarchist position from his drawings? Our claim is that De Carlo’s sketches reveal an architecture that strives to recompose a lost unity between humans and nature following the “catastrophe” of modern development (De Carlo 2010). In this regard, De Carlo’s architecture participates in what we could call an anarchism of loss, one predicated on scientific rationalism and a form of vitalism, whose limits and potential might inform contemporary attempts to think life and nature, through architectural drawing.