Lecture
Location
Auditorium
Sibley Dome
Contact
Department of Design Tech
Related Links
Abstract
Virginia San Fratello is an artist, designer, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice examines the relationships between material systems, emerging technologies, and the social and ecological conditions that shape the built environment. Working across sculpture, installation, architecture, and digital fabrication, her work investigates how objects and spaces carry coded and cultural narratives and how design can engage questions of memory, labor, and environmental transformation.
This lecture is part of the Design Tech Public Lecture Series.
Biography
Virginia San Fratello
Virginia San Fratello is an architect, interior designer, and educator. She is Chair of The Department of Design at San José State University in Silicon Valley. San Fratello is a National Design Award winner for Digital Design and a winner of the International Interior Design Educator of the Year Award. She is also a winner of the Metropolis magazine Next Gen Design Competition. Her creative practice, Rael San Fratello, was named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York, and in 2021, they were awarded the Beazley Design of the Year.
San Fratello is the coauthor of Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing, a book that reexamines the building process from the bottom up and offers illuminating case studies for 3D printing with materials like chardonnay grape skins, salt, and sawdust. She is a partner in Emerging Objects, a creatively driven, 3D printing MAKE-tank specializing in innovations in 3D printing architecture, and a cofounder of Forust.
Her work is recognized by several institutions, including The National Building Museum, the Bellevue Museum, For Freedoms, and is included in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai, LACMA, and the Design Museum in London.
