On March 18, 1969, in the late morning, I met Carlo Lucci coming out from our Faculty of Architecture in Piazza Brunelleschi. At the time, Professor Lucci was an Italo Gamberini’s assistant, and since he before had been my tutor for two years, he remembered well that clumsy boy who was able to draw despite having studied not in an artistic high school but in a classical one.
He greeted me cordially and asked what I was doing.
– I’ve just graduated and now I’m looking around.
– Why don’t you come over to help us in the Institute?
My unmemorable university career began in this way, meeting a person who on impulse made a small bet on me.
Carlo Lucci was not just any professor. In the chaotic post-1968 our university, in a lively discussion of a faculty council Giovanni Klaus Koenig said he recognized coherence only to two colleagues, and one was Carlo Lucci, who had proved it since 1944 when just to be coherent fell in a prisoner camp in Germany.
On return, he had to start from scratch, and so, after a long period of hardship, he decided to resume relations with his beloved faculty by contacting a former mate who, in the meantime, had made a brilliant career in the Florence University.
– It’s okay to be my assistant – the mate replied – but call me professor.
Frost.
Well, Lucci was not a professor of that mold. It would be limiting to say that he taught design: he taught design ethics. Of his teaching I remember two things above all: the ethical approach to design, seen as a service due to the community, and the critical method, that is, not to be satisfied with the work one is doing but always to be its first inexorable critic.
Just as some archistars do today.
In 2011, in memory of their father, Prof. Lucci’s sons published a text of memories, ‘Lontananze’. Here follows my contribution.
Ricordo di Carlo Lucci
Portrait of Carlo Lucci in captivity
(Gino Spalmach, 1944)
From left: Alessandro Bellini, Maurizio De Marco, me, Carlo Lucci.