PORTFOLIO 2015Giovanni Bellotti

giobellotti@gmail.com Graaf Florisstraat 100B

Rotterdam, 3021CM the Netherlands

RESUME 2015Giovanni Bellotti

I received my high school diploma in Pavia in 2006, at the Liceo Classico Ugo Foscolo, following a course of studies that had humanistic knowledge at its core, balanced by the introduction of the national plan for informatics which included extra hours of maths, physics and basic programming. I was then accepted at the IUAV University of Venice, where I completed my Bachelor in Architecture in 2010 with the grade of 110/110. Following my degree, I worked at a Venice based architecture office (Studio Alfa) where I took part in international competitions as well as small scale renovation projects. The same year I enrolled in the Masters in Architettura della Città at IUAV, where I developed a proposal for the densification of gravel roads and irrigation canals of the roman centuratio (Agropoly). This project was exhibited at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, within the RE-Cycle exhibition curated by Pippo Ciorra in 2012. The same year I was selected for a study period at TU Delft with the Erasmus Program. During the summer break, before moving to The Netherlands, I traveled to Peru where I worked for a period of three months at the renowned architecture firm Barclay-Crousse.

Having developed an interest in landscape and urban topics, I followed Winy Maas’s masterclass ‘Biodivercity’ at the Why Factory in the urbanism department of TU Delft. The resulting project, ‘The Wild City’, was featured on international digital and printed publications (AD Magazine volume 23- Issue 3, the Architectural Review’s folio) and later selected for the sixth International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam (IABR 2013), exhibited at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. I was invited to join the Why Factory team as a student assistant and I took an internship within the architecture faculty in 2012, where I co-tutored a second ‘Biodivercity’ studio and a workshop in AEDES (Berlin), held presentations and worked as a researcher on academic projects, amongst which the upcoming book ‘Absolute Leisure’ and ‘City Shock’, both with NAi Publishers. During this period I also collaborated with the architecture firm MVRDV for the realization of the proposal ‘Freeland’—an imaginative urban strategy for the dutch city of Almere—exhibited at the Architecture Biennale of Venice in 2012, and worked on the curation of the ‘Porous City’ exhibition, also presented at the Biennale. The same year I was awarded an Erasmus Placement grant, which allowed me to work in The Netherlands and collaborate with the firm IND (Inter.National.Design) for a period of six months.

In 2013 I developed my final dissertation for the Masters at IUAV with Paola Viganò and Alexander Sverdlov. I graduated in October 2013 with the vote of 110/110 cum laude with a thesis on Moscow’s library network. The project was selected by the faculty to represent the university at the Italian Archiprix. The results of the research were featured on international publications (among others Harvard Design Magazine n°37 and ArchDaily).

Since my graduation I have worked as a designer for SVESMI, an office for architecture and urbanism based in Rotterdam, where I designed and managed a project on various scales, including an award-winning masterplan for a residential community in Moscow and an installation for the Archstoyanie festival in the Kaluga region in Russia.

Grants and AwardsErasmus scholarship, 2011Erasmus placement scholarship, 2012Third Place at ‘Garden’ Competition, promoted by SPRECH, 2012Official Archiprix Italia selection for the Masters thesis, 2015Honorable mention at Blank Space’s ‘Dear Architecture’ Competition, 2015Finalist for the curation of the Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2015

Education2006_ High school diploma from Liceo Classico Ugo Foscolo, Pavia2010_Bachelor Degree from IUAV University of Venice in “Scienze dell’Architettura”, 110/1102011-2012_Erasmus student at TU Delft2013_Master Degree in “Architettura della città”, 110/110 cum laude2014_State Exam and professional registration at at the “Ordine degli Architetti di Pavia”

EmploymentStudio Alfa, Venice, 3 months internship in 2010Barclay-Crousse, Lima, 3 months internship in 2011I.N.D. Inter.National.Design, Rotterdam, 6 months internship in 2011, then collaborator as freelance architectThe Why Factory, Delft, teaching assistant, 9 months, 2012-2013SVESMI, Rotterdam, Architect, 2years, 2013-2015

Published and exhibited workMAXXI Museum of Rome, Re-Cycle exhibition, “Agropoly” project and models display, 2012

Dostoevsky Library, Moscow, “Moscow’s Libraries Atlas”, 2013

AD Magazine # 83, The New Pastoralism, Featured project “The Wild City”, 2013

Kunsthall Rotterdam, International Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, IABR 2013, project and research display for “The Wild City”, 2013

Harvard Design Magazine #37, Featured project in “Ditch Urbanism revisited”, by Wouter Vanstiphout, “448 Rooms with a view”, 2014

ArchDaily, Reimagining 448 Moscow Libraries, http://www.archdaily.com/553341/reimagining-448-local-libraries-in-moscow-one-step-at-a-time, 2014

Lobby Magazine #2, “The City scale Narrative” article and “Conversational Skeleton” image, 2015

Asian Culture Center, Gwangju, Republic of Korea, “Grand Tour of Tomorrow,” 2015

Dear Architecture, competition entry for Blank Space, 2015personal

Field library, installation for Archstoyanie, with SVESMI, 2013personal

Voltino, competition entry for a Mountain shelter in Carpineto, 2015personal

Grand Tour of Tomorrow, entry for Imagining New Eurasia, 2015personal

448 rooms with a View: Moscow’s Libraries Atlas, Masters Thesis, 2013academic

Agropoly, Academic Project, 2010academic

The Wild City, Academic project, 2011personal

Terraces of Espoo, Entry for Europan 13, 2010personal

Freeland, Installation for the Venice Biennale,2012office-related

Children’s Park, office project with SVESMI, Kazan Lakes competition, 2015office-related

Kotovo water village, office project with SVESMI, 2014office-related

Other work:

Porous city exhibition, 2012, office-relatedTheory and Practice, 2009, academicConversational Skeleton, 2015, personalAbsolute Leisure, 2013, academicThree projects for a park in Lota, Chile, 2014, personalIl tavolo sull’albero, 2013, personalCisternino, 2014, personalBasrah University Campus, 2015, office-relatedIzmir 2020, 2012, office-relatedLa scala, 2009, academicSketches, personal

* Collaborations naturally involve team work with multiple authorship. The shown graphics and texts of the projects have been solely, or majorly worked out and drawn by the author (Giovanni Bellotti).

CONTENT

p. 4

6

10

12

14

22

28

34

38

40

44

48

6 Dear Architecture

Dear Architecture,Ideas Competition, 2015with James Taylor-Foster

There’s nothing like a room that’s all yours. Four walls or more, a window and a door, canvas-white and waiting to be etched. The things you put within it, from a matted Ikea rug to a tattered leather armchair, exist together in a kind of comfortable stasis — one that can easily be assembled or reassembled, before being disassembled once again. Never the same but always familiar, expanding in bursts and resting for pauses, but continually growing nonetheless. If you’re anything like me—a sort of twenty-first century house-to-house nomad, oscillating between settling, unsettling and resettling—this might mean something to you.

The act of moving serves as a good way of condensing the scope of what you own. You accumulate more than you realise during a six or twelve month stay. A Tapiovaara chair that was sat at the side of the road for scrap, scooped up and lovingly sanded, cardboard tubes, bicycle wheels, postcards and prints. Oh, and books. Books, which more than anything else remind me of a moment in time or of a specific place. Happy finds in hidden bookshops, travel guides and phrase books; the “I-saw-this-and-thought-of-you” interlaced with the mass-online-purchase.

Ownership, as Walter Benjamin said, is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Even Bruce Chatwin, a true nomad, accepted that he’d eventually need a place to hang his hat. His London rooms were crafted and minimally furnished by a young John Pawson, who fulfilled the brief to a tee. But nothing could abate Chatwin’s appetite for an extravagant Regency couch which, in a flash, became the centrepiece in his otherwise sparse Belgravia apartment.

Sometimes provenance is irrelevant and it’s the thing alone which holds meaning. Worn fabric on the seat of a chair or smudged pencil marks on a table top reveal traces of use, just as the objects of the room delineate outlines of inhabitation. Amid the lived-in mess, there’s a joy in carefully composing items on a shelf. Arranging books by size, colour or author, for instance, is at odds with the complex arena of ordered disorder that each lived-in room inevitably becomes.

Perhaps the sequence of spaces that we inhabit define us less than what we actually migrate between them. Although where and how we choose to dwell inevitably shapes the way we live, it’s the curated collection of objects and furnishings that we take with us. They furrow a place inside our inner-nest, reminding us that living in a state of flux is no bad thing.

Yours,

honorable mention, Blank Space competitions

7Dear Architecture

The image depicts the rooms rented in the course of three years by the authors, and the growth of the collections of objects through time.

8 Field Library

Field LibraryInstallation for Archstoyanie festival, 2013in collaboration with SVESMIhttp://arch.stoyanie.ru/projects.php?alias=024http://calvertjournal.com/articles/show/1292/top-five-picks-from-the-archstoyanie-festival

Six objects were brought to Archstoyanie for the Summer festival. Each proposed a unique way to engage with a specific book, relating to the pictorial tradition of reading en plein air.

9Field Library

Puskin from a telescope

Haiku hat

magazine weel

Referee chair, Brodsky’s Rotunda in the background

12 Voltino Mountain Shelter

Voltino Mountain ShelterCompetition, 2015

Voltino is a shelter designed for the context of the italian Monti Lepini, developing the typical mountain shelter to allow a more extensive and flexible use of the structure.It is designed as a counterpoint in the landscape, a yellow spot in the distance to be approached by foot, well visible from afar. The vaulted structure is composed by a timber frame, assembled on site on a concrete plinth or on a dry stone base, according to the possibilities of the context. The space is composed essentially of four parts:

An entry with a dining area, a small kitchen with a locker for backpacks, coats and equipment.

A central services area, with storage for blankets and shoes anf the toilet.

A sleeping area, with two bunk beds and a foldable table.

A loft bed, with space for two guests.

The shelter is not heated, solar panels provide electricity for lighting, the water pump and an induction plate for cooking. Storm water is gathered and stored in a shaft accessible from the sleeping area. The drain is accessible from the outside, while batteries and inverters are accessible from the kitchen area.

13Voltino Mountain Shelter

14 Grand Tour of Tomorrow

Grand Tour of TomorrowImagining New Eurasia competition, 2015

Three postcards are sent by a Grand Tour traveler in a not so distant future. Enchanted by XX century architecture as one would be by greek or roman ruins, he explores and discovers Italy’s modernist past. As the monumental ruins build unexpected bonds with their changed context, memory and history become blurred - Is it a dystopia of the future or an intrusion in the past?

The three pieces portrayed are exemplary of different moments in Italian twentieth century history: The fascist “Colosseo Quadrato” by Guerrini and La Padula, part of a monumental site meant to host the 1942 Olympic games, Nervi’s “Palazzo de l Lavoro”, born in the years of post-war reconstruction and Niemeyer’s Palazzo Mondadori, symbol of the economic boom of the late 1960.

Finalist project, exhibited at the Asian Centre for Arts and Culture

15Grand Tour of Tomorrow

16

448 Rooms with a ViewMaster Thesis, Research/Academic Project, 2013with Paolo RuaroProf. Paola Viganò, Alexander Sverdlov

http://www.archdaily.com/553341/reimagining-448-local-libraries-in-moscow-one-step-at-a-timehttp://www.slideshare.net/giovannibellotti161/moscows-libraries-atlas-448-rooms-with-a-view

The library system of Moscow stands today as a piece of a wider infrastructure that no longer exists. The 448 libraries within the city’s boundaries belong to the list of soviet welfare infrastructures, along with hospitals, schools, clubs and sport centres, a complex social machine of which they are a fragment. Their present connotation, distribution, and function largely depends on this past, although the history of the libraries stretches beyond and before the 75 years of soviet regime. Its architecture can be seen as an element of continuity in Moscow’s XX century history, having survived through the change of three different regimes over one century. This continuity is expressed in their physical presence of the city, in their interiors, their collections, and especially in their direct link to political power; under each regime the libraries expressed the political message of the time.

The present condition of the libraries, in this perspective, is that of a large system in transition where the lack of political and economical interests have slowed the changes that affected other institutions. The libraries constitute a huge resource of public space -their rooms alone would cover 25 hectares, an area three times that of the red square. This monumentality, however is expressed in a long list of small interiors, worn out collections and minor histories. Recognizing the library system as a whole, before considering its circumstantial situations, is a way to understand how the network was designed and maintained.

The system embodies principles of soviet urbanism; libraries were related to the number of inhabitants and geographical distance from other services, they occupy the ground floors of the buildings and are evenly spread throughout the city. This quantitative approach in the planning faces today a variety of issues; bringing back the libraries to their present condition, studying their contexts and seeing which of these relations still exist, which don’t and which could be formed gives directions on how the network could be reorganized and on what it could accomplish. Such connections are often hidden behind a curtain of low fences, rows of garages, and blurred by the different management systems of the city’s grounds.

The Atlas proposes three ecologies and a series of public elements to which the rooms can relate both on the scale of architecture and of management. Establishing a common language among the diversity of circumstances and building an atlas of relations between the libraries and their contexts is a first step towards the new cycle of the system and in recognizing the new geography of the libraries.

Shortlisted for Archiprix Italia 2015

Libraries and rivers, parks, gardens

Libraries and metro stations

Libraries and micro-rayoni

17448 Rooms with a View

Timeline of the onstruction of the network

The libraries as a single entity

18 448 Rooms with a View

round house#2 K7- Krushovky

The role of the libraries as “places” has been in the past ten years a topic of studies mainly in Scandinavian coun-tries, where advanced welfare systems are facing ques-tions common to all cultural institutions in times of dig-italization. The Swedish and Norwegian library systems share the spatial principles of the Muscovite network: a large amount of medium to small libraries, evenly spread in the major cities12. Sweden and Norway enjoy today two of the world’s

most advanced library systems, with over 60% of the population using the libraries regularly. Scandinavian and soviet network shared from the 1930s a similar history; where social-democratic positions in Sweden paved the way for a strong welfare state, Russian communism was building a lifestyle that did not revolve around private properties - and relations- but on collective rituals and places. Reforms allowed libraries in Sweden to develop an identity as an institution less bound to ideological

The zero degree of the library

19448 Rooms with a View

P44 Tower Kvartal component

constraints, while Moscow’s libraries once missing all the range of services that completed them - sport centres, clubs, study circles, canteens et cetera - struggle to define their role. Revealing the “grade 0” of Moscow’s libraries is an operation of clearance of the historical stratification and of the ideological positions that the libraries have been carrying, reading them as a diversity of spaces with a flexible program, united by their neutrality and ability to

interact with over services and places within their reach. The operation allows to develop a unity of the system and show what it can accomplish as a whole. Neutrality, therefore, is not intended here as the absence of a pro-gram or role, but as a condition where all the possible developments are implicit within their physical space, a first step in order to bind the libraries to their physical context.

20

21

22 448 Rooms with a View

New Synergies

The more the role the library in our society is debated, the more services these seem to offer in return. Not just cafeterias, but yoga classes, local history exhibitions, guided tours and movie projections animate the rooms of the best european libraries. This collection of functions is no longer optional, but officially inscribed in the list of duties of the most advanced library systems. Libraries, in conclusion, can no longer offer mere content, but a bouquet of services. However, the more libraries divert their focus from their core function, the more their need

becomes arguable, their presence replaceable, their services available elsewhere. The library network of Moscow, having never abandoned the classical functions of a library - the loan of books - offers, paradoxically, a chance to develop an alternative library model, far from the already dry debate about digitization of content. Leveraging on the two main qualities of the network - the historical charisma of the institution and its dispersion on the territory- the images in these pages offer suggestions for collaborations between

23448 Rooms with a View

the libraries and elements or programs connected to their contexts. Rather then a plethora of additions, a selection of meaningful integrations with commercial activities that could develop symbiotically with the library. The interference between the two thus becomes an eco-tone, an area of interference where two programs can enrich one another. The balance between private and public realms is what makes the library unique. The library encourages temporary appropriation of space through a process which is repeated

daily by each of its guests. this process is essential in the definition of its public nature, and needed to appreciate it as more then a container of information. This process of appropriation is, in the best libraries, not only tolerated, but encouraged, being a key element of its atmosphere. Three integrations to the library are proposed, three different shades of this appropriation process: A library hostel - academic residence, a library - publishing house and a library-art gallery.

24

AgropolyAcademic project, Design Studio Re_Cycle, 2010with Paolo RuaroProf. Paola Viganò, Prof. Alberto Ferlenga

Agropoly is a project developed for the diffused metropolis of the Veneto area. The research proposes a series of systemic strategies on a territorial scale tackling the issues of soil consumption, agricultural monoculture and sub-urban sprawl. The traces of the roman centuriation provided for centuries the trace for urbanization and growth of the area- like the Argonaut’s ship, the roman grid has been re-built over and over across the centuries. As canals, power lines, roads and houses overlaid its lines, they enforced the original trace, rather then deleting it. Today, as the economy that sustained its growth since the 60s disappears, it’s traces are left exposed: many warehouses and factories followed the destiny of the farms and fields that were abandoned before them, when the economic engine of the area shifted from agriculture to small industry. The project proposes a series of strategies on the territorial scale in order to cast light on a new vocation for this land. Placing the ecological potential in the foreground, historical buildings as well as prefabricated warehouses are reconnected geographically through a network of low speed infrastructure. The risks related to flooding are taken as an opportunity to rethink the water network of the area alongside their agricultural function, proposing spaces for leisure, communal activities and alternative ways to inhabit this land besides the independent family house.

exhibited at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, RE-Cycle Exhibition

Agropoly model as a game on the territory

25Agropoly

26 Agropoly

conversion, from typography to greenhouse

existing public spaces, proposed areas of intervention, new routes

27Agropoly

28 Agropoly

site and proposed points of intervention according to the water and asphalt systems

the ruin as a hostel, a gate to the inner park of the centuriation

29Agropoly

30 The Wild City

The Wild CityAcademic Project/Research, 2011with Eric RevellèProf. Winy Maas, Felix Madrazohttp://thewhyfactory.com/output/the-wild-city/https://www.facebook.com/thewhyfactory/videos/862648320445331/

There isn’t a patch of land in the Netherlands that hasn’t been, one way or another, touched, adapted or protected from other environments. The “wild”, in the Netherlands, disappeared centuries ago, confining the relation between men and animals to the formality of gardens, parks and zoos, or the functional landscapes of agriculture. By defining wild space as being uncontrolled, unplanned, not subjected to any human activity - rather then focusing on the romantic construct of “the wild”- the first steps of the research look for alternative views of the city, hidden environments designed by wasted spaces, islands of temporary wildness growing on forgotten patches of the city, or in temporary voids. Four books are in the background of the project, each dealing with a different aspect of nature, focusing in different ways on the relation between nature, the city, and humans. Alain Weisman’s World Without Us provides powerful descriptions of how our built environments would react over time to the disappearance of mankind. Cities rapidly turning into forests or wetlands, houses disappearing, quickly absorbed by a not tainted natural growth, as well as the description of the few untouched environments left in the planet describe the huge variety of processes and forces against which our cities struggle every day. Gilles Clement’s Manifesto of the third landscape, provided a different point of view on the “wasted spaces” in the city. The Third Landscape, composed by vacant lots, small strips of land, or abandoned buildings and inhabited by small plants and insects gave us a vision of the “pioneers” of a spontaneous re appropriation of the land. Thoreau’s Walden described the temporary escape from the built environment and explores the author’s renewed relation to the american territory. The environment those authors picture evokes an attitude towards nature very different both from the leisure-oriented nature of our parks and from the functionalist organization of the agricultural land. The early steps of the project attempt to describe through different tools the reality of these places. David Gissen’s Subantures highlights the controversial relation we entertain with unwanted forms of nature in our city, explaining how the presence of those has always been a counterpart to architecture: the presence of unwanted guests has always helped define our idea of the domestic. The project is an exploration of the possibilities of an unmaintained world, where botany, design and architecture meet outside both the technical frame of sustainability and the comfortable one of the bucolic.

exhibited at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, IABR 2014

31The Wild City

Maintenance costs on a 200x200m area

Plants, existing and probable coloni-zers in a 5 year time frame, distribu-

ted according to their habitat

Amsterdam, a coring in the city centre

32 The Wild City

33

34 The Wild City

35The Wild City

36 Terraces of Espoo

Terraces of EspooEuropan 13 entry, 2015with Diana Ciufo and Alessandra Covini

The context of the campus of Espoo (Finland) offers a possibility to experiment with common space unique to this living condition, diverse both from the city centre and the suburban housing. The possibility is one to represent public life and positively stage its activities in a situation where a community already exists, bound by a shared feeling of belonging and purpose. At the same time, this condition is normally temporary and more directly controlled. The balance between the appropriation of space and the persistence of a common identity is a key element in the success of this particular way of living together. The project explores, in the context of the Alvar Aalto masterplan for the campus, the balance between seemingly conflicting elements - nature and density, common and private, spontaneous and predetermined starting from a sequence of themes.

1- a barcode of public ecologiesThe ground floor is left as open as possible. This distributes the main common activities between and below the housing units, according to their need of hard or soft surfaces.

2- rendering the domestic visibleEach unit can be defined by an edge, a terrace, a corner; each address is unique not only within, but when viewed from the outside, to ensure an ever present sense of the human scale of living.

3- a gradient in maintenance regimesMoving from the road to the water, a sequence of interlocked landscapes form a grammar of possible soil uses; from the high maintenance sport fields, to the private vegetable gardens, till the wild shoreline.

37Terraces of Espoo

38 Terraces of Espoo

Ground Floor 1st floor 2nd floor 3rd floor 4th floor 5h floor

39Terraces of Espoo

40 Freeland

FreelandExhibition at the Venice Biennale, 2012with MVRDV/The Why Factoryhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMoQCRweXdU

Freeland is a revolutionary approach to the way that land is developed in the Netherlands. It proposes remapping the regulation of buildings and development towards community initiative, while reinventing the relationship between governments, people, and their urban fabric through the power of the collective. It is a radically liberated place where architectural freedom extends to the urban environment as a whole, challenging and empowering citizens to become active participants in the land development process.

41Freeland

42 Children’s Park in Kazan

Children’s Park in KazanInternational competition, 2015with SVESMI

The proposal for the competition envisioned the lake area of the region of Kazan as a large scale park. An array of programs was thought for the shorelines, developing an ever-changing panorama with a focus on activities for children.

The lake’s waters were treated according to the functions, both existing and proposed, of the shore. The varying character of the project, while maintaining a focus, allowed to react to events, not just manifest, but foreseeable.

Civic water_ a new stone promenade conceals a water purification system, while offering a vast tribune to the city, overlooking the lake

Leisure_ The new marina integrates the design of the XIX century park, while a path departs from the city centre, providing a new route around the lake

Research_ A biology research centre and a children science museum are set within the first square frame, enclosing a coring of the environment and a children’s marina.

43Children’s Park in Kazan

Research_ A biology research centre and a children science museum are set within the first square frame, enclosing a coring of the environment and a children’s marina.

Children Palace_in the former site of the canoing championships, an extension composed of commercial and leisure activities is proposed.

Water Spa_A floating courtyard, between the shore and the water includes a wellness centre, framing a pool of clean water for swimming.

Water Housing_A weak frame composed of private garden and suburban villas encloses a portion of the lake. While each garden purifies via phytoremediation its own grey water, the center is left open for leisure sports and exploration. Other types of water dwelling are explored on the same lake.

44

Children’s Palace from the shore

On the path, around the lake

Children’s Palace, from within

Along the shore..

Winter in the lake spa water dwelling

45

Children’s Palace, from within

..Along the shore

water dwelling

Research center and children museum

48 Kotovo Water Village

49Kotovo Water Village

50

Design and curation for the “Porous City” exhibition at the Venice Biennale, 2012, with The Why FactoryThe exhibition brought 676 lego towers designed and built in the Why factory studio “Eurohigh” to Venice. Displayed in a grid, the pri-stine towers presented variations on a prototypical tower, developed paramtrically according to given themes.

51

Theory and Practice, collective project, Prof. Renato Rizzi, 2009A practical exercise within the course on estethics held by Renato Rizzi at IUAV. The model of Istanbul based on a XVI century map is cast in gypsum. Hand cut murrillo paper sheets are layered to construct a first positive of the model, then used to cast a rubber formwork (top left). The matrix is then used for a final cast and photographed.

Illustration for Bartlett’s Lobby #2, Clairvoyance, 2015, with James Taylor-FosterFrom the very bottom, we start in London’s Paternoster Square. Passing beneath Temple Bar Gate, we enter Sigurd Lewerentz’s Church of St. Peter’s at Klippan, before arriving at the southerly end of Victoria Tower Gardens. Passing by the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey we bear left along Victoria towards the octagonal outline of the Baptistery of San Giovanni Florence. Heading north, Buckingham Palace comes into view where, in place of the Victoria Memorial, sits the Talponia semi-spherical residential complex (Ivrea), and the Mall beyond. At this point, continuing north, we connect to the churchSaonfti Apostoli in Venice and wend our way along the Strada Nova towards the train station of Santa Lucia. This connects to the Ponte della Libertà, opened in 1933 by Benito Mussolini, as it stretches out across the Venetian lagoon. Along this viaduct sit five soviet era muscovite libraries.

The tip of the bridge then connects to the urban void between Piazza San Pietro (Vatican City) and Via della Conciliazione (Rome), which was itself a Fascist intervention completed in 1937. Heading south east, past Castel Sant’Angelo, we join the via Papale (also known as the ‘lost road of the Popes’)—a processional route that once connected the Vatican to San Giovanni in Laterano. At this point we are reoriented into Piazza del Duomo, Florence, passing along the Via dei Servi towards Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, site of Brunelleschi’s Ospedale deli Innocenti. At the altar-end of the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata sits a spatial interpretation of Antonello da Messina’s 15th century painting of St. Jerome in his study. At the very heart of this knotted network of rooms and fragments sits the Garden of Eden, as envisioned by Atanasius Kircher in his Topographia Paradisi Terrestris.

Research and illustrations for “Absolute Leisure”, with The Why Factory, 2013-ongoingFrom all inclusive resort to the allotment garden, from the caravan to the coffee corner, from the i-phone to the wooden deck, the book guides the reader through endless possibilities of having fun today. The journey through leisure scales comes with a measure of how

large, actually, leisure is today in space, time and money. While closing in on the world of fun, the book ultimately poses a question of the limits of leisure. How much more fun could our world contain?

54

Research and visualizations for Izmir’s candidacy at Expo 2020, with I.N.D. Inter.National.Design, 2011A comprehensive research on the quantities behind expos since the world fair in 1851. The comparative charts illustrate the size, economic investment, number of participating countries, visitors and other measurable quantities of expos and the cities that host them. The research was funded as part of Ismir’s candidacy for the 2020 world expo - later lost to Dubai - in order to place the perspective exhibition in context.

55

La Scala, Workshop with Luciano Semerani and Gigetta Tamaro, 2008An exercise in composition on the staircase; three pieces of a 3D puzzle compose a model where the staircase is not a medium, but the space itself, a labyrinthic cube between Escher and Piranesi.

sketches

Preservation Studio, 2008

Three projects for a park in Lota, Chile, with Alberto Favero, 2014A contribution to a collective project. Three interventions on existing buildings in an abandoned industrial park: An inhabited bridge, formerly a shipping dock for coal; A theater, hosted beneath a former factory; An opening in the shallow mining tunnels, part of a underground tour.

Il Tavolo sull’Albero, competition entry, 3rd place, with Alessandra Covini, 2012A proposal for a “neutral” object to be inserted in the catalogue of an out-door furniture company; A suspended table that avoids competing for originality, inviting unplanned uses through size alone.

Cisternino, competition entry, 3rd place, with Alessandra Covini and Diana Ciufo, 2014Cisternino is a proposal for the renovation of a XIV century Borbonic cistern in Formia. The project envisions the underground space as a water theater, open to events, exhibitions and workshops throughout the year.

Basrah University Campus, commission, with I.N.D Inter.National.Design, 2015Facade design for a school in Basrah (Iraq), composed of precast modular convex elements, casting a pattern of oval shadows.