Giorgio Scarpa Italian designer, bionics and topology researcher, teacher, and artist.
Profile and videos by Pino Trogu, San Francisco State University [trogu at sfsu dot edu]
The short videos below refer to the topics of Scarpa's two books. The first is a bionic study of the mouth apparatus of the sea urchin, also known as Aristotle's Lantern, after the first detailed study of it by the Greek philosopher. Recently new prototypes of a biopsy harvester and a ground sampler were inspired by Scarpa's model of the urchin. This new instrumentation is described in an article published in 2016 by the journal Leonardo (MIT). Click links below to download those articles. The PDFs of the bionics books are at right. The English is an unpublished draft translation; the Italian is the original text and images.
The second video shows one of the many modular chains described in the rotational geometry book, which focuses on rotational movement as a basic form generating process. Scarpa dissects the five Platonic solids and other solids into chains of hinged triangular pyramids that fold back into their enclosure cells. The PDFs of the geometry books are at right. The English is an unpublished draft translation; the Italian is the original text and images.
Both bionics and geometry books were published as part of a now out-of-print series called Design Notebooks, edited by the late Italian designer Bruno Munari. The covers of the books in that series are shown below. The other videos show more topological and bionic studies by Scarpa, including DNA models and studies of muscle cells.
This page was last updated on Saturday, July 13, 2024. On July 29, 2021, the website was moved from http://online.sfsu.edu/trogu/scarpa/ to https://res.trogu.com/scarpa/
Download PDF of complete Bionic Models book. Unpublished English translation of Italian Edition: Modelli di Bionica, 1985. Translated by Pino Trogu. 120 pages. File size: 38MB.
Pino Trogu Bio-inspired models of rotational geometry Seminar presentation. Department of BioMechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), The Netherlands. 21 December 2017 (PDF 33MB)
Cubic chain of 24 modules. Designed by Florence Yuen. (PDF) San Francisco State University, Fall 2010. Instructor: Pino Trogu. The design of the chain follows the principles and methods outlined in "Models of Rotational Geometry", by Giorgio Scarpa.
The 14 books in the "Design Notebooks" series. All books in the series are 7.5 x 10 inches.
01 Textures. 146 pages.
02 The Discovery of the Triangle. 106 pages.
03 Logo Research and Design. 80 pages.
04 Original xerographies. 96 pages.
05 Models of rotational geometry. 120 pages.
06 The discovery of the square. 160 pages.
07 Folding objects. 126 pages.
08 Active writing. 88 pages.
09 The discovery of the pentagon. 96 pages.
10 Color: code and norm. 132 pages.
11 Creativity in textiles. 80 pages.
12 A show of color. 64 pages.
13 Bionic models. 120 pages.
14 Rhythms and symmetries. 112 pages.
Click here to download the set of covers as a PDF file (6MB).
Biographical note: Giorgio Scarpa taught Descriptive Geometry for 40 years at the Art Institutes of Oristano and Faenza, Italy. He also taught Theory of Perception for 28 years at the Institute of Design (ISIA) in Faenza. His books on Bionics (Aristotle's Lantern) and Rotational Geometry, were published in Italy as part of a design series edited by the late Bruno Munari. Scarpa's mostly unpublished research includes bionics, topology, DNA and muscle structure models, at times attacking such abstract problems as defining rules on how to find one's way out of a labyrinth. Pino Trogu is Professor of Information Design at San Francisco State University and was a student of Scarpa at the Art Institute in Oristano, Sardinia, Italy, from 1974 to 1979. In 2017–18 he received a sabbatical year to conduct research on transformable origami structures at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the Netherlands, hosted by the Bio-Inspired Technology Group (BITE) in the Department of Bio-Mechanical Engineering. He received a second sabbatical to conduct further research on metamaterials at the Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics and Flexible Manufacturing Systems, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China, headed by Prof. Jian S. Dai, during the AY 2024–2025.
Giorgio Scarpa died on April 5, 2012, aged 74, after a brief illness. This page will be updated with new research and publications inspired by and derived from Scarpa's pioneering work.
For more information, please email Pino Trogu [trogu at sfsu dot edu] or visit:
trogu.com
