INTERSTICES 14

In memoriam:  
Marco Frascari (1945-2013)

 
Marco Frascari was born in Mantova to the sounds of war and in the shadow of the 
dome of Alberti’s Sant’Andrea, on 29 March 1945. He graduated from the I.U.A.V 
in 1969, where his most significant teacher and later employer was Carlo Scarpa. 
With his family, he moved to the USA where he pursued a MS in Architecture at the 
University of Cincinnati, followed by a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He 
became professor at the latter, then director of its doctoral programme, teaching 
there for almost two decades. He was visiting professor at Columbia, Georgia Tech 
and Harvard. In 2005, he left his position as Truman Ward Professor at Virginia 
Tech to become director of the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at 
Carlton University, Ottawa. His innumerable students all over the world remember 
him as one of the sincerest, most inspirational and generous of teachers.

“L’occhio” (the eye) from the serie piccolo  
(with kind permission of Paola Frascari)



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A prolific scholar, Marco wrote on architectural theory, history, representation and 
tectonics in most leading journals and, notably, in two books, Monsters of Architec-
ture (1991) and Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow-Food for 
the Architect’s Imagination (2011). He contributed “Gee Wizz” to Interstices 06 and 
“The Splendour and Miseries of Construction Drawings” to Interstices 11.

Marco was a lover of cats, above all, Herriman’s Krazy Kat who often crept into his 
writing and drawings. Truly eclectic, he explored relations between architecture 
and such topics as food and divination (the tarot, the Cathars...). I once arrived at 
a library terminal at Penn he had just vacated to find an extraordinarily extensive 
list of searches on Carribean voodooism. His favourite preoccupations were dream, 
magic, storytelling and imagination. He excelled in aphorisms. One guiding thread 
in his thinking was the embodied wisdom of the ancient Italians, which he set be-
fore the rationalism of the Greeks, Cartesians and Neo-Greeks. He explored the 
split between science and skill, a creation of Plato’s, in some of his finest papers. 
Not without a tinge of melancholia, he conceived architecture not only as a form 
of making (poièsis) but also of world-making (cosmopoièsis). A voracious reader en-
dowed with a remarkable memory, Marco always crossed historical knowledge with 
a sense of the fantastic, and critique with irony, creativity and enchantment. 

In 2009, we invited Marco as a Distinguished Visitor of The University of Auck-
land and keynote speaker for the Interstices Under Construction symposium “The 
Traction of Drawing”. It was wonderful for me to watch my former PhD advisor 
mixing with my colleagues. During his stay, he aroused our imagination and won 
our hearts.

Ross Jenner