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

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 1960’s, 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 1990’s, 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.