Portfolio Jacopo Grilli
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Curriculum Vitae
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Test #1; The Island
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2010-2022
graduation project
Silly cities
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The Solved city
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New indigenous life in a city on a strait
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Natura Sola Magistra
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Il Filo della Città
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Imagining the HU-HA: Human Habitat
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Urban Design Practice Experience
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Future Encounters
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Borgo
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art of cities
visual narration visual narration
visual competition visual competition paintings
practic / participatory experience pilot project
Curriculum Vitae Name: Email: Telephone: Nationality: Birth: Adress: Website:
Jacopo Grilli jgrilli70@gmail.com +31 685712774 Italian Milano, Italy, 29/8/1991 Jacob van Lennepkade 259-2 Amsterdam (NL) https://jacopogrilli.art
WORK EXPERIENCE 09/2021 - current
Honorary program Art & Society (Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) January-June 2022
02/2021 - current
Guest Teacher at Academy of Architecture of Amsterdam
10/2018 - 01/2022
Urban Designer at BURA Urbanism KNSM-Laan 53, 1019 LB Amsterdam
11/2017 - 07/2018
Rotterdam - Schiehaven 13M, West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture - Assistant Designer
02/2017 - 07/2017
Amsterdam - Hoogte Kadijk 143 F15 NL 1018 BH VenhoevenCS internship
12/2016 - 01/2017
Amsterdam - Pakhuis de Zwijger, Piet Heinkade 179 Ekim Tan- Play the City, collaboration
07/2015 - 08/2016
Guide and intern collaborator at the House Museum: Casa degli Atellani and Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vineyard. Milan
02/2014
Milano via Col di Lana: (MI) Italy Internship at Simone Del Portico studio
2006 - 2009
Artist’s assistant: Gianluca Chiodi’s Workshop
EXHIBITIONS 09/2021
Archiprix exhibition, Dutch design week, TU Eindhoven
06/2021
Archiprix exhibition, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam
11/2019
Exhibition Participation at Italian Institute of Culture in Amsterdam (Artistikamente Gallery)
10/2019
October 2018 “As we know it” Collective exhibition, Vondelbunker, Vondelpark, Amsterdam
09/2010
June 2015. Personal Art Exhibition at Mondadori’s Rooftop, Milan Italy
ABOUT ME I am a visual artist and urban designer based in Amsterdam. My interest is to describe and research a sense of humanity in the city. I believe that cities are the mirror of our society and working on the future by designing them means a great responsibility. My passion for images guides me to work in the field of visual arts and urban design. Imagination is the main tool and methodology for my work. The aim is to describe, imagine and modify the fundamental human environment: The City.
EDUCATION 08/2021 - 11/2021
Regenerative Cities & De-Urban Design Course, Ecodemia, London, UK
8/2020
Master Degree in Urban Design at Academy of Architecture of Amsterdam Nomination Archiprix NL 2021 master thesis project: Test#1: the Island
09/2016 - 08/2020
Master course In Urban Design at Academy of Architecture of Amsterdam
02/2015
Bachelor degree in “Urban Planning“, Politecnico di Milano Thesis work: “Transformation’s Drawing“ : Language, Purpose, Strength, Recipients.
MULTIDISCIPLINARY 01/2021
1st prize Maker zoekt maker & Keep an eye foundation to: Colours of Music project : trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dpvtijgi9Q
12/2020
Nomination Archiprix 2021 https://www.archiprix.nl/national/?project=4202
12/2020
1st prize Hackaton Ferrara (Ita) & Collaboration with Airbreak (Politecnico di Milano) Air pollution misuration system
PUBLICATIONS 03/2021
Archiprix Nomination, Best graduation projects of the Netherlands https://www.archiprix.nl/national/?project=4202
04/2021
Artwort, Illustrated interview, 16 April 2021. https://www.artwort.com/2021/04/19/illustrazione/intervista-illustrata-jacopo-grilli/
07/2021
De Architect, Tekening van de Week, https://www.dearchitect.nl/stedenbouw/artikel/2021/07/jacopo-grilli-dit-project-is-een-pogingom-mijn-utopie-in-de-context-van-de-werkelijkheid-te-plaatsen-101264040
Graduation Project
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Test#1; The Island translating an urban ideal into an urban design 2020
This project is an attempt at a work methodology where imagination is considered to be the main design tool. It suggests that the power of an image is able to inspire and suggest the culture of making projects. Over the course of about 15 years a personal intuition for a city has been elaborated and implemented through a selection of drawings that summarise the imaginative process. Subsequently, the imagination was confronted with the urgencies of the contemporaneity that underlines the actual relationship with human life in the city, such as: growth of the urban population, the urban 6 densification and sprawl, and overproduction and waste. This has resulted in a dramatic absence of nature and an ‘unconscious’ growth, based on the economy of our society. The design proposal departed from the shift of the current urban paradigm: the necessary coming together of Nature & Culture is a spatial and ethical agreement. The conclusion is reported in a panoramic picture of the renewed metropolis that enhances its qualities and represents a relevant approach of balance.
Randstad
Academy of Architecture
Full book: https://www.bouwkunst.ahk.nl/lichting/2020/student/jacopo-grilli/ Archiprix Nomination: https://www.archiprix.nl/national/?project=4202/ Interview: https://www.koozarch.com/interviews/test1-the-island/
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The Netherlands
Graduation Project
Fiction
Model
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Randstad
Plan
Academy of Architecture
“A city shaped by geography and culture that relies on its natural resources, and enhances them as the principal reason of existence“
The Netherlands
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Graduation Project
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Randstad
Academy of Architecture
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The Netherlands
II.
Silly Cities Website: https://jacopogrilli.art/cityscapes
2018 - 2022 Silly cities is a series of urban portraits representing a fictional city from a bird’s eye perspective. Those watercolors are the beginning and the core of my artistic and design expression and signature. The work: “Silly city”, is the very first attempt to declare the silliness of the incoherent development of some cities, a declaration of the uncareful choice of development.
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“Marittima”, raises the issue of the future of the coastal cities. It has to deal with the landscape fragility of the development around the heritage. Or is it just a treasure destined to get lost? “Neo medieval city” narrates the need for the compactness of contemporary cities. This compact character can be easily borrowed from medieval settlements. The inspirational power of those villages enhances the human scale, the short contacts, and the cooperation typical of a self-sustained urban settlement.
“Silly City”
“Convergent city” displays how centrality that historical developments have been maintained in the urban morphology that we can still observe nowadays. This centrality is amplified with the majority of the urban interventions consecutive to the city centers, which didn’t initiate new centers, but they built an extension around the initial core. So was there another way to expand the city?
“Marittima”
Milan
Art of Cities
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“Neo medieval city”
“Convergent city”
Amsterdam
III.
The Solved city 2021
The Solved City is a visual narration to allow and practice imagination. It is an urban dream about how to recover the historical heritage, in a contemporary and human way. It raises the question and consideration for a revolutionary yet lightweight restoration. The empty, white space on the first image represents the non-considered areas that could be open for new opinions.
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Inspired by Tarquinia
Visual Narration
Resulting in the contemplation that water, vegetation and agriculture can serve as the new and old devices for a healthy and lively city. It is a reflection of how visual representation can guide the transformation of space, society and cultural values.
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Italy
IV.
Indigenous life in a city on a strait 2021
This project first started with a perspective image of an invented city, later a plan has been drawn by intuition. Finally a 3d model was developed, from which the eye level view was extrapolated. The attempt is to work with a “backward” design process, with the aim of establishing an explorative design methodology. The serie is an imagination for a population in a strait between
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London
Experimental Visual Methodology
two lands, divided by water. The population allows land and water to flourish with its natural behaviour and attitude. They swim to traverse their main infra-structure: water. The human amphibian-inhabitants get their food by fishing and feeding themselves with what the water-land ecosystem provides them.
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United Kingdom
V.
Natura sola Magistra Website: https://jacopogrilli.art/natura-sola-magistra
2021 The lesson that Amsterdam has learned from nature is in the hidden gesture of urban engineering and design. Poetry and technique come together in a large urban environment. The postcards represent three symbolic and provocative interventions to improve the natural city in which we all love to live. The coverage of the A10 ring generates new spaces for free time and reduces the emissions of unhealthy mobility. A multilayer natural park behind the Central Station compensates the imminent growth. Urban densification through the vertical replication of the canal houses provokes the need of space 18 for housing.
Amsterdam
Visual Competition
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The Netherlands
VI.
Il Filo della Città Website: https://jacopogrilli.art/genova
2021 “An amphitheater on the sea”: protagonists are the port and the historic centre, which as actors entertain the entirety of the public from the front rows of the historic villages, to the modernist gallery, and the inevitable hills, which “push” the architecture of the city and its inhabitants to actively collaborate in collective awareness and finally to walk the thread of the city. By imagining and following the thread, the spatial and temporal reality of Genoa gets revealed: An urban entity shaped as a thin strip of life between the hills and the sea that retains a strong cultural identity. 20
Genova
Visual Competition
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Italy
VII.
Imagining the HU-HA: Human Habitat Website: https://jacopogrilli.art/genova
2020 - ongoing
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HU-HA is a visual research constituted by canvases of a medium-small format that narrate a romantic description of the city, as a questioned subject of humanity, an environment that lacks nature, empathy, and spirituality. The city is envisioned as an ecosystem, capable of sustaining and flourishing every species and interaction. The work (oil on canvas) imagines a scenario of soft urbanization, describing an organic and fluid coexistence with nature. A necessary balance needs to be described and designed for the future of the human and urban habitat that we created.
“Past of a delta city”
I believe that our motivated need for reconnection with nature will lead our behavior to a transformation, that will generate a spatial shift of the urban paradigm that dominated our society since the age of modernity. The transformative research that HU-HA wants to refer to, is a slow pace idealization of the city as a metabolic system that should look and function more and more like an ecosystem and less than an addition to the previous habitat, that the city is based upon and require energy and resources to be supported by. The dream is to reach a certain level of collective awareness of human footprint, but simultaneously realize our power to twist conditions, ideas, and factual circumstances, in order to reconnect, flourish and be, nature itself. “Feelings”
Amsterdam
Paintings
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“Urban Organism”
The Netherlands
VIII.
Urban Design Practice Experience Website: https://www.bura.city/centrum-van-zuid-rotterdam Website: https://www.bura.city/2003visionwerninkterreinleiden
2016 - ongoing Since 2016 I have been working in the field of urban design specifically in the Dutch context. Along with my studies at the Academy of Architecture of Amsterdam, I had the chance to individually find and pursue an interest in specific bureaus that would help my professional growth. As reported in my curriculum, in 2017 I’ve worked for the consultancy company Play the city. There I learned for the first time how does participation works and what type of images are suitable for this type of communication. 24
My participatory expertise increased when I started to work for Marco Broekman and BURA (same office, only the name changed). There I could combine my artistic and graphic skills with the necessity of communicating the developer and design intentions to different groups involved. By doing so, I could adjust the specificity of the images and the messages. I am very fascinated by this approach thanks to the book: Opera Aperta, by Umberto Eco. The multilayered communication of a work is the direction that I want my art to reach.
BURA The Netherlands
Practice / Participatory Experience
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The Netherlands
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HU-HA: Future Encounters Website: https://jacopogrilli.art/human-habitat
2022 - ongoing This pilot project will be part of a broader project called HU-HA (human habitat): an artistic and urban-sociological research of the future of the main behaviours, needs and practices of the human being in the anthropologic space: the city. During the research project: HUHA (Human Habitat), I study the human practices that in my opinion are the most significant for the urban lifestyle. By reflecting on each of them, I intend to elaborate and idealise the way we are going to perform these practices in the future. I do this for a design scope 26 but also for an artistic research of form, meaning and multilayered visual communication. The result will be a series of immersive paintings depicting cityscapes from a perspective point of view. Each perspective will represent an idealised version of a specific practice, that in a second stage will be “tested” in the real context of a city, which will be chosen for its features and adaptability to the topic. Therefore each practice will be represented by one city. The human practice I want to start with is: “meeting”. The project investigates, questions, and imagines the human behaviour and need of meeting performed as a necessary ritual. The outcome of the research will be a series of painting that describe the practice by envisioning and predicting how the urban space will be influenced by our changes in society, by our changing behaviour? Amsterdam
Pilot Project
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Milan
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Borgo Website: https://jacopogrilli.art/borgo
2020 This series of graphite on paper is a reflection of a very fascinating heritage settlement that many European countries have seen disappearing as living habitat: The Village. (Borgo) The etymology of Borgo suggests a center of medium size and of a certain importance, characterized by a predominantly commercial economy and with an agricultural periphery. This conception of urban settlement and the related way of living has been put in crisis in the course of centuries by the growth of the cities, 28 that incorporated the original center, or due to isolated geographical conditions (Rocca)that led to abandonment. This condition is seen in this reflection as a metaphor of a human condition of isolation, abandonment, and decadence of the soul first and the body second. The attempt is to describe this feeling “Inside the fortress” with a melancholic view of the past, that should lead to a vision. This is not only the past, those could become: “The cities of the future”. From this point, an idealized morphology has been created, and the process of imagination, design, and change has been implemented. “The emptiness of abandonment Is the potential for fulfilment”
“Inside the fortress” Milan
Experimental Visual Methodology
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Cities of the future” Italy
“Caverna”, “Ombelico”,” Laboratorio” are the consequential and fictional ideals of how a beautiful soul can be saved: with the interiorization of its own power, value, and rank. Rank in quality of life, cooperation, well-being, and satisfaction in self-fulfilment. The metaphor is referring to a human belly, that, forms emptiness, requires feeding, care, and re-functional mobilization. These works are just the first reflection for a wider and sitespecific series of projects I would like to develop for the Italian Borghi: a real opportunity for future cities.
“Caverna”,
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“Ombelico”
Milan
Experimental Visual Methodology
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“Laboratorio”
Italy
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