Romaldo Giurgola
| Romaldo Giurgola | |
|---|---|
| Born |
2 September 1920 Rome (or Galatina), Italy |
| Died | 16 May 2016 (aged 95) Canberra, Australia |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Alma mater | Sapienza University of Rome, Columbia University |
| Occupation | Architect |
| Awards |
RAIA Gold Medal (1988) Officer of the Order of Australia (1989 ) Australian Centenary Medal (2001) Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Buildings (2004) |
| Buildings | Parliament House in Canberra |
Romaldo "Aldo" Giurgola AO (2 September 1920 – 16 May 2016) was an Italian academic, architect, professor, and author. Giurgola was born in Rome, in 1920. After service in the Italian armed forces during World War II, he was educated at the Sapienza University of Rome. He studied architecture at the University of Rome, completing the equivalent of a B.Arch. with honors in 1949. That same year, he moved to the United States and received a master's degree in architecture from Columbia University. He moved to Canberra, Australia, in the 1980s. He was a partner in the Philadelphia firm Mitchell/Giurgola Architects from 1958 until his death in 2016.
Giurgola was a professor at Cornell and at the University of Pennsylvania, then at Columbia, before becoming chair of the Columbia architectural department in 1966. He was later the Ware Professor Emeritus of Architecture at Columbia. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal in 1982.
The first important building of Mitchell/Giurgola was the Wright Brothers National Memorial Visitor Center (1957) for the US National Park Service, a building that brought them national attention for three reasons. It was one of the first NPS visitors' centers that became a building type unto itself. The design was consonant with a certain aesthetic preoccupation with aviation, flight, technology and space travel of the time, the same zeitgeist that produced Saarinen's TWA Terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport. It was seen as a break with strict modernist tenets in its respect for the site and the program, as opposed to what Giurgola called "the imposition of abstract forms".
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