Similar to the layout of ancient Mediterranean villages, which balanced individual and community spaces, carpet housing deploys private and shared courtyards in low-rise, high-density apartment designs that resemble a textile or carpet when viewed from above. While at Columbia, Vinciarelli introduced ‘the type’ and led courses on carpet housing, one of the four primary housing typologies taught there. She sought to rethink these values through the study of building typologies and their relationships to specific social and physical contexts. Her work and teaching questioned the entrenched principles of modern architecture.
The Battle of Valle Giulia, one of the most violent clashes between students and police, took place on the La Sapienza campus. While at La Sapienza, she also encountered and participated in the violent unrest of the 1968 Italian Sessantotto, or student protests. Vinciarelli’s pedagogical practice had developed in an atmosphere of Italian political protests beginning in the early 1960s and was fomented by the impact of the worldwide protests of 1968. Significantly, in 1978 Vinciarelli was hired by James Stewart Polshek, Dean of the Architecture School at Columbia University, making her one of the first women to teach studio courses, along with her colleagues Ada Karmi and Mary McLeod. Vinciarelli taught at various architecture schools throughout her career – starting at the Pratt Institute in 1975, and later City College New York (1985–1992), before joining the University of Illinois at Chicago (1981) and Rice University (1982) as a visiting professor. With her IAUS colleagues Bernard Tschumi, Joan Ockman and Mary McLeod among others, Vinciarelli was a vital member of the ReVisions study group, formed in 1981, and which hosted public events that explored the relationship of art, architecture and ideology, and organised reading groups that focused on texts by prominent Italian architects and thinkers, such as Manfredo Tafuri, Galvano Della Volpe and Antonio Gramsci. She was the first and, ultimately, the only woman to be given a solo show by the IAUS, in 1978. In 1969, Vinciarelli moved to New York City, becoming involved in the activities of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in 1975 and continuing until its closure in 1984. As a student she encountered the typological and vernacular approaches to housing and urban design of Ludovico Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi, which provided a foundation for some of the critiques of market capitalism and materialism that permeated Italian architectural discourse in the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as a way of working throughout her career as an architect. In the mid-1960s she attended graduate school at the La Sapienza University in Rome, earning her doctorate in architecture and urban planning in 1971. Lauretta Vinciarelli was born in 1943 in Arbe, Italy and raised in Rome. By Caitlin Murray Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943–2011), Drawings of the hangar and open and enclosed court house (1/4), 1980.