Romaldo Giurgola is an Italian-American-Australian 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 received a master's degree in architecture from Columbia University, and has been a partner in the Philadelphia firm Mitchell/Giurgola Architects since 1958. By the early 1960s his style, mixing modernist and inclusive flavours, saw him identified as a key member of the ‘Philadelphia School’. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Society of Architects in 1982 and AIA Gold Medal in 1982, while work on New Parliament House was under way. In 1988 Aldo Giurgola settled in Canberra. He designed a tiny Catholic church in the suburb of Charnwood and a home for himself at Lake Bathurst, near Goulburn; both are represented in Martin’s painting. Giurgola is depicted by the pool in the Members’ Hall in the centre of Parliament House. The diagonal shaft of light echoes that in Tom Roberts’s ‘big picture’ of the opening of the First Parliament in 1901.