News - April 16, 2010

SUF announces winners of the Coluccio Salutati Prize

Congratulations to Quaneece Calhoun (Williams College), Logan Skirm (Whitman College), Joshua Jovanelly (USC), and Ashley Juavinett (Lafayette College), winners of the spring 2010 SUF Coluccio Salutati Prize. While all four students addressed the issue of integration into the Italian culture, the students’ essays clearly illustrate they found their epiphanies through different, very personal, every day experiences in Florence.

Matteo Duni, SUF Professor and coordinator of the award, congratulated the students on the quality of their essays, adding that “These essays demonstrate the extent to which students have challenged themselves to understand different aspects of Italy. Through their keen sense of observation, empathy, and self-analysis, they have truly succeeded in bridging the gap between their own culture and that of their host country.”

The essays vary in tone, ranging from humorous, to heartbreaking, to philosophical. Jovanelly found revelation during a transformative bus ride in the city center, packed with an impossible number of Italian passengers: “I didn’t confront Italian culture. Italian culture confronted me. It first happened on a bus. It surrounded me. It enclosed me. It made me uncomfortable. It made my body temperature rise. It made me rethink a preconceived notion.”

Calhoun wrote poignantly about the very personal triumph in her struggle to integrate herself into Italian culture as an African American:

“Just one more place where my skin is the issue, never can it be cells and tissue… I aim to piece together as many letters of acceptance as I can… I would much rather live, much rather embrace the differences than hide from them.”

Skirm discovered analogies in cultural integration and Italian grammar lessons: “Instead of conceiving of my time here as closed, in the way one would use the Italian “per” – “Sono stato a Firenze per tre mesi” – I have to recognize how what I have learned cannot be compartmentalized into the past.” Juavinett explained she bought and rode a bike during her time in Florence as “a clear assertion that I was more than a visitor here”—a determination to integrate herself in the local culture led her to develop the skills and understanding to interact with other cultures.

Notes Michael Calo, SUF Interim Director, “The Coluccio Salutati Prize is a great and challenging opportunity for students to express their ideas and discoveries on a wide variety of topics related to their cultural immersion and integration. Truly, all participants are to be congratulated.”

Open SUF architecture lecture by Cecil Balmond garners high praise

Algorithms presented as intriguing formulas leading to sleek, compelling structures that appear to defy logic and gravity. Algorithms as mysteries to be discovered, as inexplicable—and at times still undefined—forms. Sound impossible? Not when the explanation is coming from Cecil Balmond. His recent lecture, entitled ‘Informal Networks,’ organized by the SUF School of Architecture and the Targetti Foundation, was delivered to an international audience of architects, engineers, and university students of both disciplines, clearly captivated by Balmond’s charismatic delivery and brilliance.

Through his very work and research, Balmond breaks down the barriers between engineering, architecture, design, and art. He is currently the Director of the Advanced Geometry Unit at Ove Arup in London, England and Director of a new material and research initiative at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. He is well known for combining technical innovation with geometrical design excellence in his practice of experimental form making and pragmatics.

Says Lawrence Davis, Coordinator SUF School of Architecture, “Structural engineering, architecture and art have always been at the intersection of utilitarian need, spatial imagination and the illustration of progressive cultural thinking. Cecil Balmond not only understands this—he is among those on the cutting edge of capitalizing on modern network and other theories which help to visualize and produce innovative structures that represent fundamental shared global concerns and aspirations. Whether it be the World Wide Web, who’s very strength is in its complex redundancy, or making both functionally and rhetorically visible the subtle and often invisible qualities of sustainable HVAC systems that recall the delicate yet sublime fragility of nature itself, the metaphoric power of Mr. Balmond’s work uses algorithmic geometry to find a very distilled and compelling sympathy between concept and technique.”

Balmond explored a non-linear organization and unorthodox approach to merging architecture and engineering in new modes of design collaboration, exemplified in a range of projects which all probe the manipulation of geometrical mathematics in non-classical methods to produce a design that transcends traditional form. He explained his practice as an “active sense of meditation on geometry”. Award winning projects shown in the lecture include the Serpentine Pavilion in London, the pedestrian bridge in Coimbra Portugal, and, in Tokyo, a new installation exploring non-space entitled Element.

Balmond closed his lecture by teasing the audience with a glimpse of on-going research he is conducting, using algorithms to arrive at an unknown event/form. The accompanying series of images were both intriguing and unsettling. Balmond shared works in progress, including a project in the United Arab Emirates that explores rational cubic structures as pattern: beginning with a pattern, a set of numbers, and producing an unknown. As Balmond explains it, his view of both architecture and engineering has always been more intuitive than mathematical. “I was always looking at patterns—in music, literature, everything.” he said. “It was never only about structure.”