An Education into the Real
the Atelier Cantàfora at EPFL
Exhibition | Archizoom, LAPIS EPFL | Nicola Braghieri, Filippo Fanciotti and Emy Amstein | March-June 2026
Content
This exhibition explores the vast field of graphic representation in architecture through fifteen years of teaching architectural representation at EPFL at the turn of the 2000s. It presents around a hundred paintings on wood, didactic works produced between 1997 and 2007 in the teaching units of the painter Arduino Cantàfora. They suggest a possible way of making, between thought and actio, where drawing and painting structure a concept and become an essential language for expressing the founding idea of a project. Despite the transition to digital technology, the exhibition conveys the conviction that the artisanal culture of drawing and painting continues to play a fundamental and indispensable role in training architects.
Arduino Cantàfora, an architect, artist, set designer and writer from Milan, taught for over twenty years, from 1989 to 2011, at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he imparted the theory and techniques of drawing and art history to architecture students. He trained several generations of architects in the observation and representation of sensory reality, encouraging them to translate the shapes of the world into graphic and pictorial expressions. He is the author of hundreds of works preserved and exhibited in museums around the world. Among these, La città analoga (1973) became the manifesto and icon of an era in architecture.
The exhibition project was born out of the discovery of the pictorial works of Arduino Cantàfora’s students: around a hundred paintings on wood, carefully stored at the back of an EPFL building.
Human skeletons, beetles, steam locomotives, domestic interiors and, above all, around a hundred fragments of urban facades served as subjects for exercises in the art of drawing and painting.
This exhibition explores the vast field of graphic representation in architecture through fifteen years of teaching architectural representation at EPFL at the turn of the 2000s. It presents around a hundred paintings on wood, didactic works produced between 1997 and 2007 in the teaching units of the painter Arduino Cantàfora. They suggest a possible way of making, between thought and actio, where drawing and painting structure a concept and become an essential language for expressing the founding idea of a project. Despite the transition to digital technology, the exhibition conveys the conviction that the artisanal culture of drawing and painting continues to play a fundamental and indispensable role in training architects.
Arduino Cantàfora, an architect, artist, set designer and writer from Milan, taught for over twenty years, from 1989 to 2011, at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he imparted the theory and techniques of drawing and art history to architecture students. He trained several generations of architects in the observation and representation of sensory reality, encouraging them to translate the shapes of the world into graphic and pictorial expressions. He is the author of hundreds of works preserved and exhibited in museums around the world. Among these, La città analoga (1973) became the manifesto and icon of an era in architecture.
The exhibition project was born out of the discovery of the pictorial works of Arduino Cantàfora’s students: around a hundred paintings on wood, carefully stored at the back of an EPFL building.
Human skeletons, beetles, steam locomotives, domestic interiors and, above all, around a hundred fragments of urban facades served as subjects for exercises in the art of drawing and painting.
Despite the transition to digital technology, the exhibition conveys the conviction that the artisanal culture of drawing and painting continues to play a fundamental and indispensable role in training architects.
Exhibition curatorship
LAPIS (Nicola Braghieri, Filippo Fanciotti, Emy Amstein)
Archizoom (Cyril Veillon, Dimitri Kasparian, Solène Hoffmann)
Contributions :
didactic works (1997 - 2007) in the teaching units of Arduino Cantàfora
Nicola Braghieri (textes)
Filippo Fanciotti (image et textes)
Solène Hoffmann (photography)
External Links
Archizoom Exhibitions
LAPIS Exhibitions
Archizoom (Cyril Veillon, Dimitri Kasparian, Solène Hoffmann)
Contributions :
didactic works (1997 - 2007) in the teaching units of Arduino Cantàfora
Nicola Braghieri (textes)
Filippo Fanciotti (image et textes)
Solène Hoffmann (photography)
External Links
Archizoom Exhibitions
LAPIS Exhibitions
