Histories of Postwar Architecture (Aug 2020)
A House in the Form of a City. Casa Ceccarelli in Bologna (1962-63)
Abstract
The Casa Ceccarelli in Bologna was designed by Giancarlo De Carlo for the astrophysicist and educator Marcello Ceccarelli in 1961-62, a time when the architect was working on the university settlement Collegio del Colle in Urbino, while his patron was completing the Croce del Nord (Northern Cross) - the first Italian radio telescope - in the Po valley. Born as a sort of experiment between two like-minded and unusual intellectuals, this building was, in De Carlo's words, “a flagrant case of a project-process, or in other words, of architecture” but also a laboratory for studying and testing new spatial inventions in a playful way. The author of this essay has lived in the house since he was a boy, experiencing it as a miniature city surrounded by its countryside and populated by numerous friends who were always there.
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