The Architecture of Participation

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 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 the author

Giancarlo De Carlo; introduction by Luisa Lorenza Corna; translated by Alex Fletcher and Elisa Adami

Product details

• Authors: Elisa Adami, Luisa Lorenza Corna, Giancarlo De Carlo, Alex Fletcher, Giancarlo De Carlo, Luisa Lorenza Corna
• Assisted by: Luisa Lorenza Corna (Introduction), Elisa Adami (Translation), Fletcher Alex (Translation)
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 12.05.2026
• EAN: 9780262052689
• ISBN: 978-0-262-05268-9
• No. of pages: 280
• Series: Insubordinations: Italian Radical Thought
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Architecture; Architecture, Architectural structure & design, ARCHITECTURE / Methods & Materials, Individual architects & architectural firms, ARCHITECTURE / Criticism, ARCHITECTURE / Individual Architects & Firms / Essays, Building construction & materials, Individual architects and architectural firms, Materials in architecture