Prof's life
Caesar’s Beard
Roman portraiture is one of the peaks of classical art. When looking at the bust or statue of an ancient Roman we feel a strong emotion, because those portraits intensely communicate the personality…
Design with Kindness
Think how depressing it is to spend our time together with sad people, who stand there with a long face without saying a word. Of course anyone would prefer to be with cheerful, nice, interesting…
The Extremes of Dwelling
In my course of Distributive Characters of Buildings, to introduce some topics of dwelling I first made the students reflect on a point: that our projects do not only create more or less beautiful…
Designing with Music
When an architectural planning student has to spend a few hours hunched over a drafting table, or sitting in front of a monitor to manage his CAD proceedings, you can bet that sooner or later…
Draw the Path you Took to Get Here
“Draw the path you took to get here.” This is what the course assistants told us, naive first-year freshmen; and we, totally disoriented, realized then that we had sleepwalked through…
His Last Shower
At the end of the winter I noticed that one of my students wasn’t coming to lessons, wasn’t submitting works to review, nor sending emails. All that could compromise his year work not…
The Everest Top
I read in a book – ‘Into Thin Air,’ by Jon Krakauer – that a young man biked all the way from northern Europe to the Himalayas to climb Everest (obviously, not by bike), but…
The Detained Student
A student of mine ended up in prison for drugs. A large quantity was found hidden under his bed, in the bedroom of a small apartment he shared with other mates. He defended himself by saying that…
To Know My Students
An Art historian of our Faculty was about to fail a student when he asked for a last chance. Maternal instinct suggested her an easy question: “Tell me about Giotto as architect”. Too…
When I Met Carlo Lucci
On March 18, 1969, in the late morning, I met Carlo Lucci coming out from our Faculty of Architecture in Piazza Brunelleschi. At the time, Professor Lucci was an Italo Gamberini’s assistant,…