Editing Romaldo Giurgola (section)

== Early Life and Education ==

Romaldo Giurgola was born in Rome in 1920 and studied architecture at the University of Rome, where he absorbed Italian traditions of urbanism and craft that would inform his later work. After World War II, he came to America to study at Columbia University, encountering modernist approaches different from his Italian training. This dual background—classical Italian education and American modernist influence—created an architect able to bridge traditions that others saw as incompatible.<ref name="giurgola">{{cite book |last=Giurgola |first=Romaldo |title=Mitchell/Giurgola Architects |year=1983 |publisher=Rizzoli |location=New York}}</ref>

Giurgola joined the University of Pennsylvania's architecture faculty in 1954, becoming professor and eventually chairman of the department. His teaching emphasized design fundamentals and the importance of site, program, and user needs—principles that countered modernism's tendency toward abstraction. At Penn he influenced generations of architects while developing his own practice alongside academic work.<ref name="frampton"/>