Giancarlo De Carlo’s torricini. The Pineta district and the town plan of Urbino

The Giancarlo De Carlo’s work in Urbino consists of a summation of interventions on an urban and architectural scale that make the city one of the most significant examples of a city-campus designed in the 20th century in Italy. Beginning in the mid-fifties, the members of the municipal council and the rector Carlo Bo bound themselves in a project of economic revitalization of the city: De Carlo was assigned the task of translating this program into architectural forms by expanding the University facilities. The Plan reconfigures the city both inside and outside the historical fabric. Through the analysis of unexplored archival sources, the contribution focuses on the design events of one of the crucial episodes of the development of the city: the Pineta district. The settlement, conceived between 1963 and 1964 as a detailed plan of the PRG and completed at the beginning of the 1980s under the supervision of the Municipality, is located at the northern edge of the consolidated periphery, which had grown up without an order until then accurate. The buildings of the Pineta, also given their volumetry, had the task of physically limiting the expansion of Urbino and constituting the new gate of the city for those arriving from the north. The volumes of the Pineta were the transliteration of the torricini of Palazzo Ducale in the De Carlo’s city project.

Keywords: Giancarlo De Carlo, Urbino, Pineta, Town plan, Urbino University

Lorenzo Mingardi, I torricini di Giancarlo De Carlo. Il quartiere Pineta e il Piano regolatore di Urbino in "STORIA URBANA " 164/2019, pp 95-119, DOI: 10.3280/SU2019-164006