Giancarlo De Carlo (born in 1919) has been at the centre of the European architectural scene for half a century. His career epitomises the engaged intellectual. His rigorously achieved sociopolitical position grew from action as a young anti-fascist partisan in the 1940s who then in the 1950s became an uncompromising critic of the international Style and a central member of Team X which finally broke with the CIAM establishment in 1959. His philosophy has found expression in half a century of coherent architectural work: writings, teaching, design projects, publishing and - centrally - built and inhabited places layered into an existing world. History is central to his design process. There is a deep physical "reading" of place which allows the layering of new engravings on its surfaces, transformations which can unlock behaviours and rearticulate perceptions of place. Such work also depends on a deep social "reading", an engagement through active participation with the actual social condition and the rights of users to express themselves, and to question the traditional processes of architectural formation. De Carlo gained an international reputation with his first student housing at Urbino. Since the publication of his planning study of Urbino, his name has become almost synonymous with that Renaissance city, which he continues to transform with newly inserted layers right up to the end of the millennium. His ability to work with city fabric, adding and removing with surgical precision, is exemplified by his celebrated University School of Education in Urbino (1968). But his careful yet utterly unnostalgic processes have produced plans and built projects all over Italy from Sicily to Venice. By the 1980s he has become one of the most important and penetrating architectural thinkers of our time. Astonishingly, since then his architectural designing has itself been renewed with a series of sinuous, luminous and amazingly youthful, even playful, building forms most of which have not before been widely published.