Romaldo Giurgola

(1920-2016)

An influential and cosmopolitan member of the ‘Philadelphia School’ – to which also belonged architects as heteroclite as Louis Kahn or Robert Venturi – died at the age of 95. Born in 1920 in Galatina (Italy), Romaldo Giurgola fought in World War II before graduating from the Sapienza University of Rome and moving to New York, where in 1949 he earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. He would remain in the English-speaking world, and be active both as professor in prestigious institutions like Cornell, UPenn, and Columbia (whose architecture department he directed in 1966) and in a professional practice which from the very start set out to avoid the Modern Movement’s “impositions of abstract forms” in favor of an architecture more rooted in context. From this attitude came a series of notable buildings executed by his firm, Mitchell/Giurgola, prominent among which are the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk (1958) and Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra (1988), his best known work. Giurgola was given the AIA Gold Medal in the year 1982. He later settled in Australia.