Carlo De Carli Corollary: designing is generating relationships

Carlo De Carli Corollary: architecture as an ethical and poetic act

Opened on March 17 and available for visit until May 7, 2025, set up in the spaces of the Politecnico di Milano, it represents a rich and unprecedented journey into the work of one of the protagonists of Italian architecture and design in the post-war period.

Carlo De Carli Corollary is a crossing, an act of deep listening towards a design thinking that never separates doing from being. Curated by Lola Ottolini, Margherita De Carli, Claudio Camponogara, Gianni Ottolini, and Roberto Rizzi, the exhibition recomposes a living legacy, restoring to Carlo De Carli his role as an integral figure of Italian architecture: architect, designer, theorist, teacher, promoter of culture.

Through furniture, paintings, drawings, letters, notes, texts, and unpublished materials, the exhibition's path is articulated in eight corollaries - pieces that, like living cells, provide a complex and coherent vision, capable of simultaneously inhabiting art and technology, philosophical reflection, and productive concreteness.

Primary Space: architecture as a measure of human gesture

For De Carli, every project - whether it's a chair, a church, or an installation - originates from a human act. It's not the form that prevails, but the relationship. This is the heart of his idea of Primary Space, a principle that informs all his research: space arises from a gesture, from a living and responsible intention with the other. There is no separation between the design of a house and that of a piece of furniture: both stem from the same project ethic, which places the person, their fragility, and their beauty at the center.

His architecture is never a formal exercise, but a poetic embodiment of moral thought. The forms are articulated in a geometry of motion, driven by vital fires, precarious balances, and a constant tension between instinct and measure.

Art, word, and listening: the density of his thought

De Carli's texts - editorials, essays, letters - do not illustrate, but open up. Written in a sharp and lyrical language, often aphoristic, they seem to ask the reader for an effort of immersion, of slow understanding. The words do not accompany the project: they are the project.

Painting, discovered in his later years, becomes for him an additional form of operative reflection: in the paintings appear the beloved landscapes of Garda, solitary trees, autobiographical and symbolic episodes, memories of school, like a black Christ or the fallen sun of architecture. A gift, that of painting, which complements the rigor of architecture, restoring its emotional source.

A network of connections: art, education, industry

The exhibition also tells the story of a man of relationships. A friend and student of Gio Ponti, close to Lucio Fontana, Sironi, Sassu, De Carli always saw architecture as a space for dialogue. Working with companies like Cassina or Tecno, he created furniture that still speaks of essentiality and tension. With students, during the turbulent years of protests, he opened the Faculty to dialogue, educational experimentation, and social responsibility in design.

A section is dedicated to the contemporary reissue of the Dischi Table (1963), recently reintroduced by Gubi. This is an opportunity to reinterpret the furniture as a place of relationships: a vibrant structure, welcoming material, generative form.

An artwork that testifies how, even today, De Carli's architecture is capable of addressing the heart of contemporary issues: caring for others, the sense of shared space, the ethics of creation.

Beyond the object, the attitude: a lesson for today

Carlo De Carli Corollary is an act of restitution, an invitation to inhabit the thoughts of a master who has been able to combine rigor and poetry, art and design, theory and practice. A figure that rejects any unambiguous definition, but offers itself as a fertile field of exploration.

His lesson is not tied to a style, but to an attitude: the willingness to listen, the responsibility towards space and community, the continuous tension towards a measure that is not standard, but an ethical act.