Lecture and Workshop
We welcome an exclusive lecture and geometry workshop by Pininfarina on Performance Network.
Pininfarina is a legendary Italian car designer with a recent entry into architecture. Pininfarina is employed by a wide variety of automobile manufacturers to design vehicles. These firms have included long-established customers such as Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Peugeot, Fiat, GM, Lancia, and Maserati, to emerging companies in the Asian market with Chinese manufactures like AviChina, Chery, Changfeng, Brilliance, JAC and VinFast in Vietnam and Korean manufacturers Daewoo and Hyundai. Since the 1980s Pininfarina has also designed high-speed trains, buses, trams, rolling stocks, automated light rail cars, people movers, yachts, airplanes, and private jets. With the 1986 creation of "Pininfarina Extra" it has consulted on industrial design, interior design, architecture, and graphic design.
LECTURE
The lecture will be divided into two main parts: the first one will be focused on Pininfarina Architecture vision and mission. Giovanni de Niederhausern, Senior Vice President for Pininfarina Architecture, will illustrate the origin of the architectural design division, the connection with car design and the main research features such as DFMA and off-site construction, as well as generative and parametric design.
Pininfarina has always been known for its ability to create timeless beauty. However, expanding beyond the mere idea of aesthetics and style, its approach currently embraces a softer and wider meaning of physical and mental wellbeing. Beauty is indeed considered ad the ability to design an environment where aesthetic, functional and technical elements blend to instill positive sensations, through the presence of natural and artistic elements.
The second part will focus on how to efficiently model organic and fluid geometries on Rhino3D using subd and grasshopper, to demonstrate how, from a technical point of view, the Pininfarina Architecture methodology
allows to bring ideas into practice, taking in consideration several different parameters associated to the building’s use and function.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Giovanni de Niederhäusern is Senior Vice President of Architecture at Pininfarina Spa. Starting from his days in academia, with an engineering and architecture degree in 2008, and in prominent professional experiences before and after (MIT Senseable City Lab as Research Affilate, 2009; and Carlo Ratti Associati, initially as designer and PM and then as CEO in 2017), Giovanni’s views on melding innovation with design and architecture have been the leitmotiv which also has brought into Pininfarina, the Italian car design firm, after being appointed Senior Vice President of Architecture in 2019.
His research work and proximity to Academic Institutions, as lecturer and speaker, allows him to drive his team to be at the forefront of architectural innovation. With a business approach honed by his international project management experience and an MBA in 2014, Giovanni is at the helm of the Architecture division to expand the company’s range of activities in design and architecture, reinterpreting the company’s philosophy and proposing a new perspective that equates impact with the combination of beauty and technology.
