PAOLO SANZA FACULTY FOCUS:

Paolo Sanza has had a rich and rewarding twenty years at the OSU School of Architecture where, having lived in three continents, he brought his multicultural experiences and unique perspectives on design and pedagogy. He has predominantly taught in the upper division studios, and has created two new elective courses. These are the fifth-year elective design studio Architecture Without Borders (aka: The Italian Job), and a history/theory course on Modern Architecture in Italy. The idea for the Italian Job studio was sparked by a change in the curriculum in 2010 that freed the spring semester of the graduating year of a design studio. Among the elective studio’s aspirations was to draw closer to the intricacy of professional practice in Italy, Sanza’s homeland, and to provide for a collaborative environment that would connect a group of fifth-year students with a boutique Italian architectural practice, Ivrea’s FFWD Architettura, to jointly work on professional competitions within Italy. Offered on average every other year, the studio has seen its entries featured at an exhibition at Torino’s City Hall in 2012 for the reconstruction of the historical Filadelfia soccer stadium and, most recently, in the November 2021 issue of Concorsi & Architettura, which published the top fifteen entries for the competition to enhance the historical center of Lissone, near Milan.

The Modern Architecture in Italy course, first offered in 2013, surveys selected examples of modern architecture during the 1909-1943 period while simultaneously introducing students to recent Italian history and culture. The course has been significant to Paolo’s development in different fields. His interest and professional experience in graphic design has found in the course a venue to explore visual communication strategies to promote an understanding of complex topics. But most importantly, the course has been the catalyst for creating several scholarly publications including two book chapters, several peer-reviewed articles, presentations at conferences, and a research fellowship that he has just concluded in The

Wolfsonian of Florida International University in Miami Beach, which hosts one of the richest collections of information on interwar Italy. Sanza has also been involved with the School’s summer study abroad courses, bringing into the mix his extensive knowledge of Italian design culture and connections with local professionals and institutions. Furthermore, in 2018 he reestablished the student exchange program with the School of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy, ranked one of the top 10 architecture schools in the world. After the hiatus caused by COVID, one SoA student is currently in Milan, and four will head to the Politecnico in the next academic year.

Paolo’s complements his passion for teaching with an interest in exhibition design utilizing inexpensive or office-found material. For Sanza, exhibition design is an affordable way to test spatial configurations, tectonics, interaction psychology, and more; in other words, a laboratory for creating architecture. As a result of this interest, Sanza has designed and curated exhibits in Italy, at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, at the OSU Museum of Art, at Modella Gallery in Stillwater, and more than twenty at the OSU School of Architecture Gallery.