Matteo Fraschini
I’m an Architect, a researcher and a teacher with Ph.D in Architectural and Urban Design; Adjunct Professor at Politecnico di Milano and Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town (2013-2018). I’m a professional architect since 2003.
So far, during my professional career, I have always combined design practice with research and I have always considered teaching as a fundamental opportunity for discussion, debate and sharing ideas about the city, its space and those who live it.
I consider design as the opportunity to give form to an idea of space that can face problems, needs and aspirations of the complex contemporary society. Research has always been a tool to establish a dialogue and a way to learn from other experiences.
In more than 15 years of academic and professional practice in Italy, South Africa (and not only), I have been able to study and deepen these concepts, winning and receiving special mentions in international architectural and urban design competitions.
In the book Design/Disegno (link), Geometry Measure and Algorithm for architecture and the city, (Ed Maggioli, 2018), a development and a reflection of my Ph.D. thesis I present a design method that uses digital and parametric technologies as a design tool for “dynamic” control of formal architectural characters. I propose a virtual dialogue between the “revolution” that the discovery of perspective meant in terms of design processes and contemporary design. The key elements of this dialogue are mathematics and geometry as tools able to make a form readable, measurable, modifiable and thus designable. The dissertation develops the relationship between abstract and concrete, visual and tactile, discrete and infinitesimal, the scene and the stage, as essential aspects of contemporary design.
Abstract
In a design process, the drawing (disegno) of an object or a space is the act of representing that thing with the idea of knowing and modifying it, and it is surely an essential moment.
It is an operation that requires a synthesis capable of projecting and confronting on a two-dimensional surface - physical or virtual - the complexity of the world with an idea of form.
The concept of measure and measurement is therefore, for the designer, the instrument that makes it possible to make an object, architecture or a urban fact representable, abstract, knowable and therefore designable. Similarly, for the user of that space, the measurement will help to memorise, map and place him in relation to it.
Mathematics and geometry, particularly in Western architectural culture, have played a fundamental role in enabling this knowability. The machine of the two mirrors invented by Brunelleschi opened up the definition of the rules of perspective and performed the compression of a three-dimensional world regulated by numbers, on a two-dimensional surface. Thus, it allowed the definition of a bijective (one-to-one) relationship between the drawn and the real world. This operation reinforced the distinct role of the tactile and the visual dimension - the stage and the scene - and permitted to describe and graphically think of infinity and the infinitesimal.
Towards the end of the last century, Frank O. Gehry created his machine to “see and know” what he had manually modelled. He developed a digital tool that would help to study and refine, on a screen, the folds made on his cardboard models.
Mathematics as the element that structures (not always explicitly) the form, making it recognisable, for centuries has organised this invisible framework through discrete measures, proportions and modules. Now, the complexity of the contemporary built space, and not only of its most iconic architectures, seems to require a leap in the quality of the instruments that allow its readability and modifiability.
In the past, space was read and organised on the juxtaposition between the city and the countryside and on their peculiar measures. In the reality of urbanity today, the thresholds between the different parts that form it are rather describable as blurred surfaces readable through the concept of continuity and varying intensities. In this new dimension, the ground, as a thick modified and modifiable surface, maintains an essential role to organise a possible readability of a space that otherwise struggles to find its references.
These themes are addressed from a technical point of view, understood as the necessary knowledge to imagine and make an idea designable. Technique (téchne) therefore, must confront with the digital instrumentations where mathematics and measures are inflected as algorithm and modality of variation.
This book is a reflection that, with the benefit of practical examples, proposes to reason on the relationship between an idea and its representation, between a sketch, analogical and digital models, and on the “mental” tools which manage this relationship.
It is furthermore a reflection on the theoretical and practical implications of the concept of fold, or better, on the act of folding, as a concrete and tangible capture of the infinitesimal that directs a tectonic possibility. To do this, to try and control the infinitesimal as a measure that gives structure to contemporary design, a delving into mathematics as the algorithm that manages the machine, was necessary.
This publication is based on the doctoral dissertation in Urban and Architectural Design presented at the Politecnico of Milan and on the research and teaching activities developed by the author in that school and, subsequently, at the University of Cape Town.
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Research Trajectory
The following publications give evidence of a research organized around some clear questions.
They are linked to the relationship between architecture, the city and its scales. They consider design, and its methods the node of the discussion.
Contemporary architectural design methods are therefore studied not only in relationship to (digital) tools but also, in a wider perspective, from a theoretical and cultural point of view. An essential part of the question is therefore related to the contemporary built environment, its fabrics, its infrastructures and its landscapes. Their morpho-typological characters, the tools to read and interpret them are considered necessary ingredients for a dissertation about contemporary design.
These topics have also been addressed in design competitions to clarify research questions and to “test” from a practical point of view a possible formal output.
The body of work consists of journal articles, conference proceedings, essays in books and monographs.
The book Design/Disegno aims at giving an organic overview of this research, which began with the Ph.D. Many of the publications reported here highlight the close connection between research activity and teaching experience.
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Web Articles:
Fraschini, Matteo. “Identità E Riconoscibilità Nello Spazio Dei Flussi (Http://Www.Arcduecitta.It/2012/10/Identita-E-Riconoscibilita-Nello-Spazio-Dei-Flussi-Matteo-Fraschini/).” arcduecitta.it 2018, may (2011).