Giovanni Torre Architectural Portfolio
Giovanni Torre Architect
PROFESSIONAL PROFILE My name is Giovanni Torre and I am an Italian first class MSc Architecture graduate with over two years’ commercial experience. Currently I am working as Architectural Designer, creating interior designs and concept visualizations for several large-scale commercial buildings and high profile clients such as Calvin Klein, Alibaba and Ferrari. I have also worked for an engineering firm, supporting their contract work in Brazil and providing a concept design for a new city, which would house 500,000 people. My working experience in China, my study abroad in Spain and my involvement in international projects have equipped me with strong interpersonal and communication skills while being fluent in four languages – English, Spanish, Catalan and Italian. I am currently looking to join an international firm where I could use my strong technical ability and my experienced background in the industry to deliver innovative and creative design solutions for ever challenging design propositions.
KEY SKILLS • Eye for unique design concepts – this stems from my passion for architecture. My Italian heritage allows me to understand the identity of the site and reinterpret it in contemporary terms. • Excellent time management skills – I was able to complete the concept design for a very important client and submit the final schematic in one week, thus securing the contract over much larger rival firms. • Strong communication and interpersonal skills – apart from being employed directly by an architectural firm, I have also worked as a consultant with an engineering firm, supporting them with their contracts in Brazil. I have also done freelance work directly for clients and in each situation, I was able to adapt my style of communication and approach to help develop the task goals. • Publication – my final dissertation was published in an architectural magazine in Italy.
SOFTWARE SKILLS • • • • • • • • •
Autodesk Revit Adobe Photoshop Maxon Cinema 4D + Vray Rhinoceros Autodesk Autocad Adobe InDesign Adobe Illustrator Dynamo for Revit Grasshopper
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English Italian Spanish Catalan
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EDUCATION • Architecture Master Degree - University of Florence, Italy; Sep 2008 - Dec 2014 Final thesis published in high profile architectural magazine “Architettura Progetto Interpretazione” Degree Mark: 110/110 • Erasmus Program - Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona; Sep 2011 – Jul 2012 • High School Diploma - Arturo Checchi high school, Italy; Sep 2003 – Jul 2008
Tel : +86 150 264 99 221 @: giovannitorre.89@gmail.com skype: giovannitorre89 WeChat ID: giovannitorre 666, Hongqiao Lu, 200000, Shanghai, China
WORK HISTORY Architect
Area-17 Architecture & Interiors, Shanghai - China (www.area-17.com)
Apr 2017 - present
Key responsibilities & Achievements: • Responsible for working closely with senior architects and gaining an understanding of project characteristics, based on budget, timescales and materials, presenting ideas and technical drawings which helped me consistently to achieve an accurate reflection of initial design vision; • Created architectural designs, interior designs, and concept visualizations for a high-end luxury shop in Shanghai;
Architect
Area-17 Architecture & Interiors, Florence - Italy (www.area-17.com)
Dec 2015 - April 2017
Key responsibilities & Achievements: • Created architectural designs, interior designs, and concept visualizations for several large-scale commercial buildings; WW• Demonstrating excellent technical ability whilst using a combination of industry standard rendering software such as Cinama4D, Rhinoceros, AutoCAD and Photoshop; • Demonstrated an excellent sense of initiative and ongoing desire for self-development whilst independently learning about and implementing Revit and Grasshopper, thus saving many hours of work per each design schematic.
Freelance Architect
Various Clients - Italy and Spain
Feb 2015 - Jul 2015
Key responsibilities & Achievements: • Recognized for skill in architecture and approached privately for consultation on a renovation project of a private residential property in Catalonia; • Making the initial site visit and assessing the complexity of the work and determining cause of damage to the property; • Arranging a meeting with the client to give initial feedback on remedial work, and discussing the types of materials available for use based on budget set by client, which really enhanced my interpersonal and communication skills.
Architecture Consultant
Studio Tecnico Mangoni, Pistoia - Italy (www.studiomangoni.it)
Jan 2015 - Dec 2015
Key responsibilities & Achievements: • Developed an innovative prototype design for a city aimed at housing 500,000 people in an underprivileged part of Brazil; • Demonstrating excellent communication and team working skills in Wfinalising key design concepts and presenting these to the Brazilian team; • Creating high-end presentations which effectively demonstrated solutions previously posed to us by the engineering teams;
Architect Intern
LDA.IMDA Architetti Associati, Pisa - Italy (www.ldaimda.it) Key responsibilities & Achievements: • Responsible for the design of an expansion for a country house in San Miniato, Italy; • Created the urban design of a residential district near Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
Jan 2015 - Dec 2015
Giovanni Torre Architect
Tel : +86 150 264 99 221 @: giovannitorre.89@gmail.com skype: giovannitorre89 WeChat ID: giovannitorre 666, Hongqiao Lu, 200000, Shanghai, China
SELECTED PROJECTS
Aurora Borealis Observatory Rovaniemi - Finland
Natural Science Museum Berlin - Germany
Parametric Perfored Wall Modena - Italy Yatch Club Forte dei Marmi - Italy
The New York Projet Queens, New York - U.S.A.
Church and Parish Center Sesto Fiorentino - Italy
Casa Raventós Villanova i la Geltrù - Catalunya
HEMA Shopping Center Beijing - China
Nova Sinòp Sinòp, Mato Grosso - Brazil
Parametric Perfored Wall Modena - Italy, May 2016
This project comes from the necessity to give a façade to the new shopping mall in Formigine (near Modena), in order to mitigate its visual impact and to improve its integration into the urban landscape. The main idea was to make use of white aluminium sheets, the same material used on the other three sides of the building, and to include on these panels a natural landscape illustration through the use of perforated panels.
The new façade is 38m wide and 7m heigh, for a total surface of 280m2. Since the panel’s dimensions are 120x240cm, we needed 99 panels to cover the whole façade. The drawing we chose had not repetition, consequently all the 99 panels had to be different one from the other. The specific complexity of the drawing did not allow us to design the holes through the traditional workflow.
dimension: 38 ml 280 m2
scale: ☑ Small ☐ Medium ☐ Large ☐ Extra-Large
category: ☐ Academic ☐ Competition ☐ Freelance ☑ Professional
location: Modena, Italy
To me, this has been the opportunity to test the parametric design and to implement the use of Grasshopper between my design skills. I had previously studied this modeling technique but I never had the opportunity to use this software in a real project. The algorithm we created starts from an array of points arranged over the panels’ surfaces, afterwards a circumference with variable radius has been linked to each one of the circles. The maximum circle’s radius has been calculated in order to not create interferences with the adjacent circles. Finally we used a grey scale map to calculate the effective radius of every single hole and recreate the desired drawing.
Parametric Perfored Wall: The algorithm generating the holes in the faรงade
Parametric Perfored Wall: Samples of the Perfored Panels
Casa Raventós Villanova i la Geltrù - Catalunya, February 2015
A few days after my graduation, I received an e-mail from a good friend who lives in Barcelona. Beyond the congratulations for my graduation, in the mail he said that he just had inherited his grandparents’ house in Villanova I la Geltru’- a town near Tarragona and that he was planning to renovate it. Moreover, he was asking me – as a new graduate architect – to reach him in Catalunya to survey the building and to discuss with him the guidelines of the project. I could not believe it: I had been an architect just for about a week and I already had found a professional work as freelance architect. I could not miss this occasion! So I left to Catalunya, where I did a survey campaign and I could see and understand the problems and the potentialities of the building. The house is a 3 floors high building with a trapezoid shape plan. Although there wasn’t any evident structural issue, the main rooms appeared to be badly illuminated and aired. This fact was because these rooms were exposed on a back patio, which, during the last years, had been surrounded by very high buildings that blocked the sunlight and visibility to it. Therefore the project results focused on the target to give back natural light and air to the living rooms. In order to achieve this, we decided to demolish the existing staircase and to relocate it on the back corner of the house. In this way we were able to expand the living room in direction of the main façade, where all the sunlight comes from. On the attic, a new glass volume allows the light to penetrate into the house through the new open staircase.
dimension: 200 m2
scale: ☑ Small ☐ Medium ☐ Large ☐ Extra-Large
category: ☐ Academic ☐ Competition ☑ Freelance ☐ Professional
location: Villanova i la Geltrù Catalunya, Spain
Aurora Borealis Observatory Rovaniemi - Finland, April 2012
This project has been done for a design competition organized by Archmedium in Spring 2012. The competition expected the design of a resort structure located in one of the most remote and cold environments of the world: the Finnish Lapland. The project site is on the top of a hill close to Rovaniemi’s lake, one of the places of the earth where it is most likable to see the famous Northern Lights. Several hypogeum environments, organized by a polar geometry, compose the project. The hall is located in the center of the complex and connects all the parts of the building. Three glass domes, sustained by a wooden external structure, cover the common areas (the restaurant, the sauna and the planetarium) while the bedrooms are located downstream and overlook the lake from a wonderful position.
dimension: 1800 m2
scale: ☐ Small ☑ Medium ☐ Large ☐ Extra-Large
category: ☐ Academic ☑ Competition ☐ Freelance ☐ Professional
location: Rovaniemi, Finland
Yatch Club Forte dei Marmi - Germany, December 2014
At the “Architectural Design Lab III”, run by the Professor Michelangelo Pivetta at the University of Florence between October 2010 and July 2011, the aim of the course was to design the new Yatch Club in Forte dei Marmi, a famous holiday destination in Versilia - Tuscany. The project site is a significant knot in the region geography since it’s the meeting point of the most important coastal road, which connects all the bathing sites in Versilia, and the main street of the Town, via Michelangelo Buonarroti. This street has a considerable historical-infrastructural value because for centuries it has been used to carry the famous Carrara Marble to the Mediterranean Sea. This road indeed, once arrived near the coast line, becomes a pier and continues in the sea for several meters.
The Building my team an I designed is configured as a system of parallel ramps with opposite inclination. The main ramp – bigger – as a wave that rises from the sea represent the façade of the building for the city and, at the same time, create a shaded and ventilated space beneath it for the refreshment of the bathers during the warmer hours of the day. This area can also be used as a boat shed in the winter time. The smaller ramp, rising in the opposite direction, configures a double glass volume where all the functions of the club are organized. Above this system of tilted floors, easily accessible both from the beach and from the square in front of the building, there is a wide observation deck that offers a 360” view from the mountains to the sea.
dimension: 2700 m2
scale: ☐ Small ☑ Medium ☐ Large ☐ Extra-Large
category: ☑ Academic ☐ Competition ☐ Freelance ☐ Professional
location: Forte dei marmi, Italy
The New York Projects Queens, N.Y. - USA, January 2017
These projects are the result of a cooperation between area-17 Florence - the company where I used to work in Italy - and a New York City based firm called Morali architecture. All these projects are located in the Queens District of New York. The goal is to purpose three samples of Italian approach to different kind of typical New York’s buildings. The first project is located in Bay Terrace, it is a residential building placed over an existing car park structure. The façade of the building is a composition of reflective glass and dark stones. A massive use of the vegetation on the balconies characterizes the image of the construction. This project was designed through the BIM technology according with the American standards and it was, for me, the chance to use Revit in a real project. The second Project takes place in Queens Boulevard and it is a mixed-use building that forecasts different kind of shading systems in relation with the necessity of natural light required by the functional program. In particular, on the offices volume we proposed the use of microfored panels (generated through a parametric design) instead of the metal plates used in the residential tower. Unfortunately this project was not finished. The third project, the most complete of the three, is located on the waterfront of the 15th Avenue just in front of La Guardia Airport. Our purpose was to reinterpret the typical New Yorker townhouses in a European language. We chose some influences by the Dutch architecture in order to spice the façade’s geometry up and to give some color to the building. Also this project was completely designed with Revit.
dimension: 14500 m2 (Bay Terrace) 9500 m2 (Queens Blv) 2800 m2 (15th Avenue)
scale: ☐ Small ☑ Medium ☑ Large ☐ Extra-Large
category: ☐ Academic ☐ Competition ☐ Freelance ☑ Professional
location: Queens, New York, U.S.A.
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Church and Parish Center Sesto Fiorentino - Italy, June 2013
This Project has been done for the “Architectural Design Lab V�, with professor Paolo Zermani, at University of Florence, between October 2012 and June 2013. Through the analysis of the history and the evolution of the Florence Plains, from the age of the first Roman settlements until the modern times, it appears clearly how the relationship between it and the city center has changed radically in the last 60 years. It took more than 7 centuries to build the Florence’s countryside landscape; it has been a linear project that gave value the potentialities of the plain and its innate characteristics. The demolition of the city walls at the end of 19th century allowed the city get out its historical borders and to invade the Plains: the fragile balances began to break. The final collapse of this equilibrium happened with the industrial boom in the 60s. Before 40 years, the valuable and protected area became a miserable and featureless suburb. As per definition, periphery has no proper center; it has to gravitate towards something else and to depend on it.
dimension: 9000 m2
scale: ☐ Small ☐ Medium ☑ Large ☐ Extra-Large
category: ☑ Academic ☐ Competition ☐ Freelance ☐ Professional
location: Sesto Fiorentino, Italy
From this point comes the idea to give a new center to the Plains, to recover the marks from the ancient romans centuration and to create an intersection of axes that organizes and measures Florence’s suburbs. In this way, the intersection of two perpendicular axes creates a crux, that, since ever has been the symbol of the Church and the Christianity, and it is the shape over which churches have been built for centuries. The morphology of the landscape suggested the idea of a system of low volumes and voids.
All The public spaces are reflected into the voids: a large cross carved into the ground that accommodates the square, the access ramp and the churchyard. Inside the large volume which rises over the excavation is located the church. The system of porches works as a filter between the open spaces and the underground ones, in which are organized the rectory, the classrooms and the other spaces dedicated to the community.
Berlin Natural Science Museum Berlin - Germany, December 2014
I presented this project as my master degree thesis in Even to define the identity of the city in architectonical architectural design with the supervision of Professor and formal terms results senseless. If something typical Fabio Fabbrizzi and Professor Loris Macci of University Berliner exists, it must be the continuous transformation. of Florence. Since the political, social and economic systems that Among the European cities, Berlin is the most suitable govern Berlin nowadays are the same in the rest of the to embrace innovations, both in technological and in western world, and because these processes cannot be cultural fields. The transformation processes which completely stopped, it became possible to read in the touch every urban environment, in Berlin don’t seem to changes of Berlin what is going to happen in other find the resistances that, elsewhere, obstruct or brake western cities in the next decades. the natural city’s development. In view of these considerations, the city of Berlin During the last decade, when Berlin became the economic appears to the designer as an incredible opportunity: to and political de facto capital of European Union, the have to think about an architecture that has to integrate transformations happened with such a speed that every and relate with a dynamic environment is a fascinating attempt to read the city at the actual state result and demanding practice. almost obsolete.
dimension: 16.500 m2
scale: ☐ Small ☐ Medium ☑ Large ☐ Extra-Large
category: ☑ Academic ☐ Competition ☐ Freelance ☐ Professional
location: Berlin, Germany
step 0: project site
step 1: separation
step 2: basament
step 3: distribution
step 4: linking systems
The competition “Natural City – Berlin Natural Science Museum� organized by AWR Competitions, was the perfect chance to confront with these potentialities and undertake the most interesting and current research and design path. The theme of the competition was the elaboration of a design proposal for the Museum to be located in a southwest area of the city, close to the Tiergarten Park and the Charlottenburg neighborhood. The project area is defined on a side by the library of the Technische Universitat, and on the opposite one by the railway that divide the site from the famous zoological garden. The functional program given by the competition notice forecasted different spaces according with the dimensions and the kind of the exposition; some didactical courtrooms, an auditorium for conferences and several laboratories and rooms for the research. Basically it required a museum dedicated to all the ages ranges, with didactical and ludic areas.
Natural Science Museum: Planivolumetric Plan
In such an important city, in the heart of the university campus, we cannot imagine the museum like an object close into itself without any relation with the surrounding. On the contrary, this place must have a dual life: one interior, with the expositions and the didactic spaces, accepting the visitors; and another one exterior, regardless of the opening hours, addressed to anybody that lives that part of the city.
The project is made by two systems: the basement, treated with bricks, which hosts an elevated plaza; and the exhibit volumes in concrete. Through a glass gallery, which organizes all the complex, the exhibith rooms are connected with the adjacent library of the University. In this way we obtained a macro-system composed by two buildings that exchange continuosly flows of people.
In this way it’s possible to obtain a new way to use both The museum must open itself to the city around, take the cultural centres. something from it and, in change, return a value through Moreover, the presence of a recess and numerous glass its presence. walls connects the museum with the city.
Natural Science
Museum: Section
Nova Sinòp Sinop - Mato Grosso - Brazil, July 2015
Nova Sinòp: Concept Masterplan
This project is the result of a one-year long collaboration between the Studio Tecnico Mangoni, the professors Fabio Fabbrizzi and Enrico Mangoni from the University of Florence and a team composed by me and other five architects recently graduated from the same school.
city, of course, but also of collect the waters during the rainy season and of prevention from the floods that usually happen in other cities of that region.
Then we overlapped a stiff orthogonal main road system in order to connect in the most efficient way all the Our aim was to design the concept for a new city, which neighborhoods of the city. integrates the most innovative ideas in the field of renewable energy sources, infrastructures, urban design In the connection points between the two shapes (the and social life. curvy line of the river and the strict chessboard of the streets) we have the most interesting happenings: The site is located near the city of Sinòp in the State we approached this part of the project with a special of Mato Grosso – Brazil, in an area of that has been eye for landscape and integration between landscape and suffering the effects of deforestation and now wants to architecture. The result is made by several different propose a smarter settlement system. “islands” which host the main public services of the city – the hospital, the stadium, the university, the The project began with a research phase, in which we municipality and so on. All these places are characterized studied some case studies of smart cities around the by the connection with the channel and so they have a world. strong relationship with the water; at the same time they After that, we spent some months designing the concept are easily reachable by the urban infrastructure. masterplan that integrates the characteristics of the site with the outputs of the first phase. Moreover, the design of these “islands” influences the urban texture around them and makes all the neighborhoods New Sinòp - this is the name of the city - is organized by appear different to each other. the overlapping of several infrastructural layers with different grades of stiffness, which generates various types of urban textures. In particular, we proposed a navigable canal, which is connected with the near Teles Pires River, and crosses the project site with a curvy pace. The canal has a double function, of connection between the parts of the
Nova Sinòp: Settlement phases
Nova Sinòp: Study of infrastructures
Nova Sinòp: Marina building and fluvial port
On the final step, we studied in detail the possible infrastructure systems, the connection between the roads and some particular building like the fluvial port, the marina, the car parks around the city ( a place where people coming from outside can leave their cars and catch the public transportations). Our conclusion was that the city of the future must live without gasoline and people have to move just with electric cars or public transportation. For these reason we reduced the area allocated to the streets in order to improve parks, gardens and pedestrian squares around the city. In the end we proposed a possible construction program to study how the first settlement can survive in the first years and how the rest of the city could grow around them, according with the masterplan.
dimension: 20,25 km2
scale: ☐ Small ☐ Medium ☐ Large ☑ Extra-Large
category: ☑ Academic ☐ Competition ☐ Freelance ☑ Professional
location: Sinòp, Mato Grosso Brazil
Tel : +86 150 264 99 221 @: giovannitorre.89@gmail.com skype: giovannitorre89 WeChat ID: giovannitorre 666, Hongqiao Lu, 200000, Shanghai, China
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