Angewandte Architecture Alumni Club

Matias del Campo heads the Vienna-based Architecture firm SPAN, founded together with Sandra Manninger in 2003. His award winning architecture designs are informed by an ecology of sources including Romanticism, Geometry, Biology and Botany. Employing among the most sophisticated digital design and fabrication tools, SPAN has become among the leaders of a new generation of form based practices in Europe. Del Campo graduated from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and received the MAK Schindler Scholarship in 2006. In 2008 and 2010 he served as Curator for the Architecture Biennale in Beijing. His teaching assignments include Institutions like the Dessau Institute of Architecture, the University of Pennsylvania and Fudan University in Shanghai, China. 

SPAN’s work explores the opportunities present in the morphologies of advanced design techniques as a launching platform for the design of architectural conditions, simultaneously exploring the discursive implications of the individual projects. Inherent qualities such as spatial articulation, components, organization, structure and circulation form the ground for a variety of speculations on novel spatial conditions. The sensorial and spatial definitions co-notated with the manifold qualities of contemporary, algorithm driven approaches are scrutinized for their architectural qualities. The practice investigates how intensive forces, including solar radiation, weather systems, acoustic forces and wind pressures can be used as means of formation for architectural bodies. SPAN´s obsessive explorations of contemporary moods are fueled by the opulent repertoire of materialization in nature as well as form as a driving force at large. The underlying presence of curvilinear desires reflects back and radiates in conditions informed by a manifold of cultural lineages such as Baroque geometries, Romantic atmospheres or the presence of the endless in Frederick Kieslers work.


UPCOMING SLIVER EVENTS 2012
April 19th: Thomas Auer, Transsolar, Engineer, Stuttgart
April 26th: Andrew Watts, Architect / Facade Designer / Author, London 
May 10th: Jeff Kipnis, Critic, Columbus, Ohio
May 14th: Iwan Baan, Photographer, Amsterdam
May 16th: Louise Lemoine, Filmmaker, Paris
May 22nd: Ben van Berkel, UNStudio, Architect, Amsterdam
June 5th: Francesca von Habsburg, Art Collector and Director of TBA 21