Architects Who Read ILAUD and the Predicaments of Direct Experience

Abstract

T his paper takes a historical approach to architecture's search for its unique mode of intellectuality and focuses on a mid-1970s debate on direct experience. It concentrates on the tool of 'reading' the city, which was explored at the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD), established in 1976 by Spazio e Società's founder Giancarlo de Carlo (1919-2005). This educational laboratory-an extension to Team X-invited students and acclaimed practitioners from diff erent universities around the world to rethink urban form. During ILAUD's formative years, the physical and social environment of Urbino functioned as a frame of reference: all participants were invited to develop strategies for urban interventions, based on a thorough understanding of the marks left by social, historical and topographical transformations on the physical space. 'Reading' was the proposed method of action to unravel an intricate web of relationships in the physical environment. De Carlo preferred the analysis of existing urban complexes through direct experience over the interpretation of maps or archival sources. Reading by drawing, arguably, was not a contemplative activity, but a performative practice best suited for architectural intervention. By contrasting the studio brief of the second ILAUD residential summer courses in Urbino to a series of highly illustrative student drawings, this paper sheds light on the diff erent and often contradictory implementations of this method of reading by drawing. This paper furthermore argues that this experiential planning method became a tool in enabling and representing a critical stance vis-à-vis the fi gure of the architectural historian and traditional 'linear' historiography. Reading by drawing was an attempt to retrieve an 'essence' which was believed to be 'truer than history or words', and thus involved a search for an architectural knowledge that was embedded in architectural and urban form. This paper argues, however, that reading by drawing was by no means a self-contained analytical tool that covered all layers of complexity, but a deliberately tentative design approach that fed on the hinge between interpretation and projection.