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Vittorio Giorgini’s Architectural Experimentations at the Dawn of Parametric Modelling

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Polyhedra and Beyond

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Abstract

Vittorio Giorgini (1926–2010) grew in Florence, Italy, where he attended the School of Architecture. From the earliest years of his academic studies, Vittorio Giorgini showed interest in developing research on natural models with the aim of applying them to architecture. Starting from the 1960s, his studies focused on the analysis of membrane structures, tensile structures, and on the elaboration of tetrahedral and octahedral structural meshes. He experimented spatial meshes in an intuitive way, even if he understood, at the end of his career in the late 1990s, that only with the help of technology and electronic instruments it would be possible to obtain a mathematical control of meshes.

Based on an in-depth analysis of Giorgini’s projects, drawings, and documents collected in his private archive, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how pioneering Giorgini was anticipating several years of recent investigation in the field of parametric modelling and computational design.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Architect Marco Del Francia for his support and for making available the Vittorio Giorgini’s Archive (B.A.Co. – Follonica (GR), info@archiviovittoriogiorgini.it).

Authors’ Contributions

The paper shows the results of a research coordinated by Denise Ulivieri.

The contributions of Denise Ulivieri (D.U.), Marco Giorgio Bevilacqua (M.G.B.) and Filippo Iardella (F.I.) in the elaboration of the paper were: Introduction (D.U.); Giorgini as a morphologist-spatologist architect (D.U.); Giorgini as a pioneer of parametric design (D.U. and M.G.B.); Giorgini Parameterized (D.U. and M.G.B.); Conclusions (D.U. and M.G.B.).

All the digital and graphical elaborations were developed by Filippo Iardella, under the supervision of Denise Ulivieri and Marco Giorgio Bevilacqua.

All the English translations of cited texts in Italian are by the authors.

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Correspondence to Denise Ulivieri .

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Ulivieri, D., Bevilacqua, M.G., Iardella, F. (2022). Vittorio Giorgini’s Architectural Experimentations at the Dawn of Parametric Modelling. In: Viana, V., Mena Matos, H., Pedro Xavier, J. (eds) Polyhedra and Beyond. Trends in Mathematics. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99116-6_8

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