Giancarlo De Carlo (12 December 1919 − 4 June 2005) was an Italian architect. Biography Giancarlo De Carlo was born in Genoa, Liguria, in 1919. In 1939, he enrolled at the Milan Polytechnic, where he graduated in engineering in 1943. During the Second World War (WWII), he was enlisted as a naval officer. Following the armistice of 8 September 1943, he went into hiding, taking part in the Italian Resistance with the Movement of Proletarian Unity in which other Milanese architects such as Franco Albini also participated. Later, De Carlo organized an anarchist-libertarian partisan group in Milan (the Matteotti Brigades), together with Giuseppe Pagano. At the end of the war, De Carlo publicized Le Corbusier in Milan and joined the anarchist movement, eventually participating in the first congress of the International of Anarchist Federations in Carrara. In this period, he began his collaboration with the anarchist magazine Volontà, in which he tried to launch new social ideas for reconstruction and the incessant need for social housing. In 1948, De Carlo resumed his studies at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (Università Iuav di Venezia) where he received his degree in architecture on 1 August of the following year (1949). In 1950, he opened his own studio in Milan. In 1951, he organized an exhibition on spontaneous architecture and, three years later, presented three short films written with Elio Vittorini in which he denounced the drift towards a modern metropolis run by bureaucrats and technicians, in whom interest in man is not a priority, and urged the spectator to act personally. In 1955, De Carlo obtained a professorship in urban planning, which he maintained until 1983, coming into contact, and often clashing, with the major names in Italian architecture and urbanism such as Giuseppe Samonà, Carlo Scarpa, Bruno Zevi and Paolo Portoghesi. Between 1952 and 1960, De Carlo was part of the new generation invited to participate in the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). In 1956, as an Italian member of the CIAM, De Carlo presented his own project for a housing complex in Matera in which all the principles of le Corbusier are ignored at the expense of specific attention to the geographical, social and climatic context of the region. It is a strong break with the old generation of architects and the myth of a unique international architectural model. Thus, in the 1956 congress, the end of the