Ralph Erskine and Italy: a dialogue with the historic town

Ralph Erskine belongs to the young generation of architects who contributed to the debate on the controversial heritage of the Modern Movement in the second postwar. His participation to Team 10 from 1953 to 1959 has led to the meeting with the Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo, that soon evolved in a long-lasting professional relationship and friendship for their common sensibility. This can be considered as the first sign of his contact with Italy and Italian architectural culture. He visited central Italy in the 1970s and 1980s and took part in the Giancarlo De Carlo's International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD). The interest on his work arisen by Italian magazines opened him the way to few Italian commissions in the country, a chance to deal with the historical city, from Ancona to Florence and Siena. This chapter of Erskine’s career is still largely unexplored, as the large collection of letters, drawings and photographs from Italy preserved in the architectural archives of ArkDes. The legacy of the Italian projects of Ralph Erskine is worth to be thoroughly studied in comparison to his proposals for the centre of Cambridge (1962) and Stockholm (‘Corso’ for Sergels Torg, with Léonie Geisendorf and Andres Tengbom, 1966), who should be recognized as embodying valuable lessons in the dialogue with history and context.