Matias del Campo is a Chilean born Austrian

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

, designer and educator, co-founder of the architectural practice SPAN.

Education and early career

Matias del Campo graduated from the

University of Applied Arts Vienna The University of Applied Arts Vienna (german: Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, or informally just ''Die Angewandte'') is an arts university and institution of higher education in Vienna, the capital of Austria. It has had university sta ...

in 2003, receiving a Master of Architecture with distinction. His ideology is a reflexion of the explorations he manifests towards contemporary tendencies, representing an alloy between “materialization protocols in nature, cutting-edge technologies and philosophical inquiry which together form a comprehensive design ecology”. During his tenure within the

Hans Hollein Hans Hollein (30 March 1934 – 24 April 2014) was an Austrian architect and designer

studio at University of Applied Arts Vienna, he was first introduced to Computational Design, being one of the students chosen by Hollein to learn programming in

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

and test 3D modeling packages.

SPAN

In 2003, alongside architect Sandra Manninger, he started the architectural practice SPAN, a bureau with offices in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

and

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flow ...

, and one of the first offices to focus on computational design in Vienna. The practice is currently developing projects in

Jakarta Jakarta (; , bew, Jakarte), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta ( id, Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta) is the capital and largest city of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coast of Java, the world's most populous island, Jakarta ...

Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...

Wuhan Wuhan (, ; ; ) is the capital of Hubei, Hubei Province in the China, People's Republic of China. It is the largest city in Hubei and the most populous city in Central China, with a population of over eleven million, the List of cities in China ...

Chengdu Chengdu (, ; Simplified Chinese characters, simplified Chinese: 成都; pinyin: ''Chéngdū''; Sichuanese dialects, Sichuanese pronunciation: , Standard Chinese pronunciation: ), Chinese postal romanization, alternatively Romanization of Chi ...

Guangzhou Guangzhou (, ; ; or ; ), also known as Canton () and alternatively romanized as Kwongchow or Kwangchow, is the capital and largest city of Guangdong province in southern China. Located on the Pearl River about north-northwest of Hong Kon ...

and

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. Initially, the practice started gaining a reputation in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

for its radically advanced projects, becoming supported by the Architecture Centre Vienna, which showcased their work and commissioned the bureau with exhibition designs and for the remodeling of the center's headquarters, and won an award from the Austrian Experimental Architecture awards. The studio thinks of architecture as a process. SPAN started gaining international recognition in 2010, when the architects won the competition for the Austrian Pavilion within the

Shanghai World Expo Expo 2010, officially the Expo 2010 Shanghai China, was held on both banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China, from 1 May to 31 October 2010. It was a major World Expo registered by the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), in the tr ...

, as well as the newest Brancusi Museum in Paris, France. In 2011,

Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna The MAK – Museum of Applied Arts (German language, German: ''Museum für angewandte Kunst'') is an arts and crafts museum located at Stubenring 5 in Vienna's 1st district Innere Stadt. Besides its traditional orientation towards arts and crafts a ...

invited SPAN to conduct a solo show in their gallery, other architecture practices invited to the exhibition series include

Greg Lynn Greg Lynn (born 1964) is an American architect, founder and owner of the Greg Lynn FORM office, an o. University Professor in the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and a professor at the UCLA School of the Arts a ...

Asymptote In analytic geometry, an asymptote () of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as one or both of the ''x'' or ''y'' coordinates tends to infinity. In projective geometry and related contexts, ...

FOA Foa may refer to: People * Arnoldo Foà (1916–2014), Italian film actor * Barrett Foa (born 1977), American actor * Edna B. Foa (born 1937), Israeli psychologist * Emanuele Foà (1892–1949), Italian engineer * Eugénie Foa (1796–1852), ...

, and

Lebbeus Woods Lebbeus Woods (May 31, 1940 – October 30, 2012) was an American architect and artist known for his unconventional and experimental designs. Known for his rich, yet mainly unbuilt work and its nonetheless significant impact on the architec ...

. Now a widely, internationally recognized practice, SPAN's work was featured at the 2012

Venice Architecture Biennale Venice Biennale of Architecture (in Italian Mostra di Architettura di Venezia) is an international exhibition of architecture from nations around the world, held in Venice, Italy, every other year. It was held on even years until 2018, but 202 ...

, at ArchiLab 2013 at the FRAC Centre, Orléans, France, the 2008 and 2010 Architecture Biennale in Beijing, and in the 2011 solo show ‘Formations’ at the

. Most recently, SPAN's work was highlighted in a solo exhibit at the Fab Union Gallery in Shanghai China. The practice is known for actively practicing in building design and at the same time elaborating the theoretical and discoursive base for novel developments. All projects are conceptualized as vehicles of exploration.

Teaching

Matias del Campo currently teaches as an Associate Professor of Architecture within the

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning The A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, also known as Taubman College, is one of the nine professional schools at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Taubman College offers the following degrees: Bachelor of Science ...

at the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

. He has also been a Lecturer within the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Design Philadelphia, and a Guest Professor at the Dessau Institute of Architecture, Germany.

Research, writing and lectures

In 2015, Matias del Campo received the Accelerate@CERN fellowship Award Research award, courtesy of the Swiss CERN Institute, a one-month artist residency within

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

, aimed to artists which are spending for the first time within a science laboratory. Together with Sandra Manninger, the two architects spent the month of May 2016 within the Institute, their research being true to that of SPAN philosophy, aiming to “go beyond beautiful data to discover something that could be defined voluptuous data. This coagulation of numbers, algorithms, procedures and programs uses the forces of thriving nature and, passing through the calculation of a multi-core processor, knits them with human desire.” Matias del Campo has been a guest editor for Next Generation Building, by

TU Delft Delft University of Technology ( nl, Technische Universiteit Delft), also known as TU Delft, is the oldest and largest Dutch public technical university, located in Delft, Netherlands. As of 2022 it is ranked by QS World University Rankings among ...

, in March 2016, and in November 2016 for the AD Magazine in London, UK. His newest book premiered on the 22nd of March 2017, entitled ''Sublime Bodies, Architectural Problems in the Postdigital Age'', published by

Tokyo University , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project by ...

Press, Shanghai, and is featured both in Chinese and English. He has contributed to many publications in the field of Computational Design, such as Marjan Colletti's ''Digital Poetics'' (Ashgate 2013) or Mark Burry's ''Scripting Culture: Architectural Design and Programming'' (

Wiley Wiley may refer to: Locations * Wiley, Colorado, a U.S. town * Wiley, Pleasants County, West Virginia, U.S. * Wiley-Kaserne, a district of the city of Neu-Ulm, Germany People * Wiley (musician), British grime MC, rapper, and producer * Wiley Mil ...

2011). In 2016, del Campo was Technical Chair of the

ACADIA Acadia (french: link=no, Acadie) was a colony of New France in northeastern North America which included parts of what are now the Maritime provinces, the Gaspé Peninsula and Maine to the Kennebec River. During much of the 17th and early ...

conference Material Frontiers 2 - Synthetic Biologies, curating and moderating the discussion. He has lectured worldwide, within institutions such as IAAC, in January 2017, RMIT Australia in 2015, The

in July 2015, La Sapienza Rome in February 2015,

, UCLA, TU Innsbruck in 2012 or Hyperbody Studio

, Netherlands in 2008.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Campo, Matias del Living people University of Applied Arts Vienna alumni Austrian architects University of Michigan faculty Year of birth missing (living people)