Cristiano Toraldo Di Francia Biography
Cristiano Toraldo di Francia (Florence, 18 September 1941 – Filottrano, 30 July 2019) was an Italian architect. Son of Giuliano Toraldo di Francia, after graduating in architecture he founded "Superstudio" together with Adolfo Natalini in 1966, where architectural language and design were reworked on the basis of highly ironic methods of disruption. After this experience, in 1980 he continued his own professional career, drawing inspiration above all from the language of sixteenth-century Tuscan architecture. In 1973, at the height of Superstudio's production, he started, together with Adolfo Natalini, the Architecture program at the California State University in Florence. Thus began an educational journey that, in this structure, will last almost thirty years. At the beginning of the nineties, having moved to the Marche region, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia started a series of initiatives aimed at comparing American and Italian design culture. In particular, the "Filotrano Seminars" (since 1992) established a bridge between Tuscany and the Marche for generations of students coming from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly Pomona. Toraldo di Francia was a full professor in the Faculty of Architecture (now the "Eduardo Vittoria" School of Architecture and Design) of the University of Camerino, based in the city of Ascoli Piceno, from its foundation in 1993 until his retirement due to age limits, In Florence he created the shelter of Santa Maria Novella, which attracted fierce criticism right from its construction: it was abolished twenty years later.
