The Public of Architecture brings together two essays that analyze architecture's complicity in materializing the social divides imposed by the structures of economic, political, and cultural power, and question the role of schools, criticism, and the media in consolidating the inconsistency and vagueness of the architect's position. De Carlo proposes alternative paths for the methodological reconstruction of disciplinary creative processes toward a total commitment to the real context of society and its most fundamental spatial needs.

Reading Giancarlo De Carlo today is not a journey into the past, to the more than six decades since his first publications. Reading Giancarlo De Carlo today is to read an insightful and current critique of the profession; it is a clear call to understand the status quo in which we move and work, and the ways in which this system can be subverted. Each of his words contains a harsh critique of capitalism, precarity, forced specialization, and the way in which we in architecture play its game and avoid taking a stand and acting with the social responsibility that a profession that goes beyond the production of physical space could and should have; a practice that can influence the way we inhabit our cities and, consequently, our planet.