Marco Frascari

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Marco Frascari is an Italian architect and architectural theorist born under the shadow of the dome of Sant Andrea in Mantova, in 1945. He studied with Carlo Scarpa at IUAV and received his PhD in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught for several years at the University of Pennsylvania, then as Visiting Professor at Columbia and Harvard, then he become a G. Truman Ward Professor of Architecture at Virginia Tech and is currently director of the Carleton University School of Architecture in Ottawa, Canada. Marco Frascari is far more well-known in the English speaking world than in his country of origin.

Frascari has written innumerable architectural essays that teach a lost language of sensual architecture; an architecture based on the body, physical memories, symbology, alchemy, demonstrative logic, the nature of representation, and material magic. While having a great lecturing capability to explain complex ideologies and architectural stories in simple and easily comprehended terms, Frascari uses the art of writing to demonstrate his architectural thinking. His essays and books utilize a deep, complexly layered language that is also consistent with his architectural theories. These very style of his writings reflect the very nature of his architectural sapience.

[creation of words. teachings based on the melding of arts. the nature of metaphor in architecture. etymological amalgams, Italian, English, Latin. a body of unlikely influences from cult artists or simply odd architectural stories that have never completely surfaced in the mainstream body of architectural education. (German periodical, jiri kolar, synesthesia) ..to be finished]

The intrigued architect or student, having never have met or studied under Marco Frascari, will be puzzled by the complexity of his cosmopoietic view of architecture. This is due to the complexity and density of the semantics of his most published works (Monsters of Architecture and The Tell-tale-Detail), as well as the sheer rarity of these very titles (The Tell-tale-Detail has been translated in Spanish and in Japanese).

One could easily assume that considering the semantics of Frascari's writings, his students find themselves slipping into a realm of thought without production. Instead, he is a teacher that works through demonstration, and he demands the creation of physical artifacts. Many of his teaching techniques--by now infamous in the various schools where he has been--are the same methodology of his own instruction by Carlo Scarpa, reflecting Scarpa's own despise for the growing political nature of the modern movement. The mind-boggled, frozen-handed student of today's cacophonic, image-driven magazine world instead confronts a man who insists on seeing constant, yet HAPPY, physical production. Frascari teaches to DRAW, and to draw joyfully. One of the most well-known exercises that Marco asks students to do is a semester long building section.

Architecture is a field of slow evolution. Due to the international nature of the various universities he has taught at, Frascari's students, many of which are already architects, are slowly beginning to carve Frascari's words into the constraint-filled world. We can only hope that by the time Frascari's reminders as to what architecture truly is come to fruition that true architecture, which is a function of humanity, will still have a place in our lives as we move through the fourth machine age and into the fifth.

[edit] Publications

Monsters of Architecture (1991)
"The Tell-the-Tale-Detail," (1981)
"Una Pillola per sognare ... una casa (1996)
"Due Anni di Esperienze dello Studio Estivo dell’ Universita della Pennsylvania In Mantova (1994)
"Architects, never eat your maccheroni without a proper sauce! A macaronic meditation on the anti-Cartesian nature of architectural imagination Nordic Journal of Architectural Research
"Foreword to Alfonso Corona-Martinez’ The Architectural Project,2002
"A tradition of architectural figures: a search for Vita Beata” in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture. George Dodds and Robert Tavernor, eds. 2002.