Giancarlo De Carlo (born 1919) has been at the centre of the European architectural scene for half a century. 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. By the 1980s he had 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. The book, which gives a survey of De Carlo's work from the beginning in the early 1950s up to the present day, accompanies an exhibition on the architect in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and other venues.