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Architectural Projects of Marco Frascari: The Pleasure of a 
Demonstration 2015, Sam Ridgway
Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, pp.109.

ISBN 978-1-4724-4174-4

Hardback

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This is a useful collection of commentaries on the fascinating work – both 
written and built - of the Italian architect and academic Marco Frascari, 
who died in 2013. Frascari, born in 1945 “under the shadow of the dome 
of Alberti’s Sant’ Andrea in Mantua,” graduated as an architect from the 
IUAV in Venice in 1969, initially working in both the design office and 
the teaching studio of his mentor Carlo Scarpa. After completing his 
PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, he taught at a number of North 
American universities, including Georgia Institute of Technology, Virginia 
Polytechnic Institute and State University, and again at the University of 
Pennsylvania alongside Joseph Rykwert and David Leatherbarrow in the 
mid-1990s. His final appointment was Director of the Azrieli School of 
Architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Like Scarpa, throughout his career Frascari had something of an obsession 
with the articulation of the construction detail, which he saw as a kind of 
compositional unit from which whole buildings could be progressively 
assembled. But what raised his work beyond the crude idea of repetition 
– the building as a simple ‘piling up’ of individual details – is a deeper 
understanding of the detail itself as a kind of hybrid composition of 
elements. In a typically mischievous move, Frascari preferred to call these 
hybrids ‘monsters’, which allowed him to play various etymological games 
that linked terms like demonstration (which can mean both a drawing 
or a building) with the Italian word mostre (exhibition). If the detail is a 
monstrous union of dissimilar materials brought together into some sort of 
unlikely expressive relationship, Frascari likewise treated the building as a 
whole as a collage-like composition of distinctive fragments. It is this idea 
that drew him towards working with historic buildings, again in an echo 

Architectural projects of Marco Frascari: 
The pleasure of a demonstration

J o n a t h a n  H a l e

of Scarpa’s approach to the layering of historic and contemporary fabrics 
– perhaps best exemplified at the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona. The 
three projects featured in Ridgway’s book all involve new interventions 
within existing structures; for example, the Stanza Rossa involved a major 
remodelling of a disused silk factory in Vicenza, just a few hundred metres 
from Palladio’s famous theatre, the Teatro Olimpico. The focal point of the 
reconstruction is the insertion of an altar-like central bathroom, raising 
the normally mundane act of bathing to a self-consciously spiritual level. 
In place of what in a cooler climate would more likely have been a central 
fireplace, the reference to a sacred well-spring at the centre of the house 
recalls Gaston Bachelard’s meditations on the archetypal four elements. 

Also featured in the book are two projects from Frascari’s time teaching 
and practicing in the USA: a remodelling of a Master’s Apartment in a 
student hall of residence at the University of Pennsylvania and a major 
reworking of a single-family house for his own use on the outskirts of 
Alexandria in Virginia. In both cases the spaces are transformed by a single 
dominant idea, which in the first is the opening up of a central light-filled 
stairwell that allows the journey up to the main living space to take on a 
ceremonial quality. In the Villa Rosa in Alexandria an alternative approach 
is taken, effectively wrapping the existing volume in a series of discrete 
but distinct new elements. The plan geometry is the driving principle in 
this latter example, with the aim of reorienting the kitchen and master 
bedroom to align with the north-south axis. The rotation of these key 
elements highlights another of Frascari’s design preoccupations: the role 
of geometric drawing instruments in the ‘drawing out’ of an idea. The 
humble compass becomes an instrument of divination in Frascari’s very 
personal history of the ‘crafty art of architecture’, where he makes a direct 
connection between the geometric construction of the drawing and the 
actual setting out of the building at 1:1 on site. The compass therefore takes 
on the role of mediator or messenger between the realms of the actual and 
the possible, a function analogous to that performed by angels in the art 
and literature of the Christian tradition. Frascari again makes much of the 
play on words between angel and angle in one of his best known published 
writings, while many of his drawings feature compasses with angelic wings 



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attached, transforming them into quasi-magical tools of discovery and 
communication.

As a book, its format as an essay collection brings with it some minor 
if obvious drawbacks, one of which being a degree of repetition in the 
introductions and conclusions to the early chapters. By contrast the 
book cuts off rather abruptly at the end of Chapter 6, without an overall 
conclusion to draw the various strands of the story together. But overall 
it still constitutes a much needed and timely reminder of the singular 
achievements of an influential figure. For me, as a former student of 
Frascari’s as well as an occasional collaborator, his work has been a huge 
source of inspiration, as well as an ongoing challenge to try to continue. I 
am happy to say that Sam Ridgway has also taken up this important task 
and offers here a highly engaging and insightful analysis that should make 
his work available to a new generation of researchers.