by Alan Smart // Sept. 16, 2025
The 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture is themed ‘Intelligences Natural and Artificial,’ which means, literally, that architecture is addressed as and through “large language models”—deemed to be somehow both “artificial” and “intelligent.” This device works to pull the diverse elements of the Biennale together into a single system, or lexicon, such that the galaxy of projects, pavilions and peripheral sideshows appear as combinations of shared signifiers. Among this galactic cluster, however, one exhibition stands out as being not just another text but a different language all together. At Università Iuav di Venezia, Sara Marini and Alberto Petracchin—partisans of the old kind of intelligence where words mean specific things—have curated ‘Giancarlo De Carlo: The Open Work.’ As a scholarly, historical exhibition, ‘The Open Work’ includes enough archival documents to make its case in the words of the original actors, while also offering an abundance of visual material to present something worth arguing for. Marini and Petracchin’s deft reintroduction of Giancarlo De Carlo into the contemporary context is timely in that it represents an inflection point in architectural discourse that hinged on questions of how architecture can be linguistic or semiotic.
‘Giancarlo De Carlo: The Open Work,’ 2025, installation view at Università Iuav di Venezia // Photo by Gabriele Bortoluzzi
De Carlo was the Italian representative in “Team 10”—a group of younger architects charged with organizing the 10th meeting of the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1959. They, however, decided to dissolve the congress and plot a new course informed by concepts of social form taken from structuralist linguistics, anthropology and systems theory. This structuralist current in modernism was opposed by various articulations of “post-modernism” with other conceptions of architecture as language. ‘The Open Work’ shows that, while these conflicts were often over the meaning of words, they were nonetheless concrete in their implications. It is organized into four sections, each titled with terms De Carlo used generatively in his projects. These are, significantly, not concepts he originally developed but rather interpretations of contested issues from architecture discourse.
‘Giancarlo De Carlo: The Open Work,’ 2025, installation view at Università Iuav di Venezia // Photo by Gabriele Bortoluzzi
The first section is ‘Participatory and Interactive Architecture,’ and features a 1968 Master Plan for the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv, imagining an urban system figured as a “place of experience” rather than a modernist functional city; ‘Participation City,’ an interactive installation at the 1970 Osaka Expo; and an exhibition for the XIV Triennale di Milano in 1968 revisiting the theme of “The Great Number”—a “thinking tool” or grid intended to help analyze and represent the projects submitted to CIAM meetings—that had been central to pre-war CIAM discourses. De Carlo’s conception of participatory design, from which the idea of the “open work” derives, spans older modernist notions of open form and process-based design, and then-newer assertions of community design pushing back against modernism’s technocratic expertise. In Milan, it appeared, this was not always an easy gap to bridge. The question of “the great number” was posed by CIAM in the context of developing utilitarian “minimum dwelling” standards before the war. De Carlo reanimated the concept in relation to post-war globalizing culture. This was, however, rejected by students, artists and activists opposed to the “massification” of modern subjectivity who occupied the exhibition space and, after long and bitter negotiations, left it completely destroyed.
‘Giancarlo De Carlo: The Open Work,’ 2025, installation view at Università Iuav di Venezia // Photo by Gabriele Bortoluzzi
These tensions continue in the ‘In Cities and Territories’ section, which includes a range of projects beginning with an urban planning exhibition for the X Triennale di Milano in 1954 and continuing to a 1994 master plan for Urbino. These offer departures from the static modernist master plans—which have a fraught history in Italy for having been imposed on cities as prerequisites for Marshall Plan reconstruction aid—into various forms of “openness” to natural and social processes, or the ongoing unfolding of organic cultural context.
‘Giancarlo De Carlo: The Open Work,’ 2025, installation view at Università Iuav di Venezia // Photo by Gabriele Bortoluzzi
This is followed by ‘”Spontaneous” Architecture,’ which negotiates between conceptions of vernacular “architecture without architects: from the structuralist anthropology of Team 10, and the valorization of traditional culture in postmodernist tendencies. This section features photographic research for an exhibition at the IX Triennale di Milano in 1951, and a later study of potentials for reinhabiting an abandoned rural village, Colletta di Castelbianco. “Spontaneity,” however, has other valences in the Italian context and for De Carlo specifically. Throughout his life, De Carlo was a committed “anarchist”—a mobile signifier whose meaning changed along with his political reality as he went from fighting as an anti-fascist partisan when the was young, to becoming an established practitioner who wanted to stake out a leftist position in line with “autonomous” social movements interested in auto-production, and self-management, rather than the bureaucratic and often reactionary Communist party.
‘Giancarlo De Carlo: The Open Work,’ 2025, installation view at Università Iuav di Venezia // Photo by Gabriele Bortoluzzi
The fourth section, ‘Spirits,’ mediates between materialist conceptions of “spirit” animating the modernist sense of zeitgeist and historical progress, and the more romantic formulations of genius loci—the “spirit of place”—reasserted by postmodernism. This contains some of the most visually lush projects in the exhibition, including a 1986 proposal for the Salzburg Museum and a 1990 proposal for the Piazza della Mostra in Trento, both of which seek to integrate with visual semiotics of the cultural spaces into which they intervene without being the kind of recombinant pastiche that postmodernism inaugurated—and which has now come into full, fully-automated, flower with AI.
‘Giancarlo De Carlo: The Open Work,’ 2025, installation view at Università Iuav di Venezia // Photo by Gabriele Bortoluzzi
Meditating on the (dead) end of modernity, in his 1965 film ‘Alphaville,’ Jean-Luc Goddard imagines a world-city enthralled by an all-knowing, admirative general AI. In what was brilliant prescience in 1965, but now seems obvious, the super computer’s dialogue is lifted from Jorge Luis Borges, including a segment explaining that the possible combinations of words are finite and that a time will come when “everything has been said, provided words do not change their meanings and meanings their words.” At a point when this semiotic heat-death seems to be approaching with ever accelerating velocity ‘Giancarlo De Carlo: The Open Work’ offers both hope and warning that words can, and do, change their meanings.
Exhibition Info
Università Iuav di Venezia
‘Giancarlo De Carlo: The Open Work’
Exhibition: May 10-Nov. 23, 2025
iuav.it
Dorsoduro, 1827, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy, click here for map
