Work Sample

MATTHEW DIPIETRO 21 Summit Ave, Cedar Grove, NJ 07009 973.787.4951 mattd2@vt.edu mattdip22@gmail.com

Voided Space Installed at the Navy Pier in Chicago for the 2018 Sculptural Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) fair, Voided Space is the realization of a proposal for a student led design-build competition.

In a mass of people the rhythm of the crowd collectively reverts to a hum, and the surreal gains a foothold. In this condition it becomes

In our space we seek the state of waking up from the crowd to become aware of the presence of another. This is a connection that

easy for a single mind to assume the muddiness of dream-thought, guided not by the rational or binary, but by the vast unexplored

can’t be felt toward a group or crowd. Human presence becomes pared down and idealized, with the physical character of Voided

volume of what is potential. We believe it is in the transition- from dream or from crowd back into conscious rhythm- that the volume

Space being the impetus of that action. For this task to be handed to cold material and be fulfilled is an undertaking with the potential

of potential present in what lies ahead in time becomes visible. It is to extend the length of this transition that interests us.

to sustain the growth of the students involved beyond any individual exploration. One discipline can form the question, but it takes the

Outwardly, a crowd is rational. Its directionality seems brilliant, focused, and unchallenged, but inevitably it splits off over and over until

multitude of perspectives brought by varied backgrounds to produce a provocative response.

the individual remains. The period of time that elapses between the states of gathered to alone is a hidden transition; each division is imperceptible. If something draws on an individual to leave abruptly, the lengthened transition we pursue is lost.

Voided Space

Voided Space

Material Obsessions To be obsessed means to have an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes a person’s mind. When I cast concrete for the first time, a domino fell and set off the chain of projects that would become the basis for my thesis work. There is no final piece at the end of this thesis. The thesis is the tenets by which I work: the Beginning and the End at Once, the Process is the Idea, the Formwork is Architecture, the Process of Construction is a Performance, the Building Makes Its Site. It is not a thought process, but rather a belief system; this is how architecture should be.

Material changes everything.

studying everyone’s work when I happened upon a cube made of Rockite. I was enamored with its oneness.

I set out to construct a formwork the next day, and I remember taking the whole day to make. I treated it like a performance—pieces

In the first weeks of my first year I was assigned a seemingly simple task: to design a beautiful cube. For weeks I continued to work,

going into place here and there and sequencing the steps of assembly, pour, and removal out in my head. I opened the bag of Rockite

seeking beauty until I found the form I deemed so. It was a simple extrusion of a hollow square constructed with pieces of chipboard.

and dumped it into a bucket with some water. I stirred until I had a slightly-thinner-than-pancake-batter consistency. I looked down into

I glued the last piece, stepped back and studied the cube. Immediately, I was dissatisfied. I had not found beauty, but instead the

the bottom of my mold and began pouring. When you pour anything there are the feelings of anxiety, excitement, and anticipation. You

chipboard pretending to be something it is not. I had planes coming together to make something solid, but no matter how sharp its

can never be a hundred percent sure of anything. The viscous liquid flows into the mold, obeying only gravity. I remember finishing

edges and clean its glue lines the chipboard cube would never be one. I remember walking through the rows of desks in my studio

the pour and sitting there at my desk staring at it for a half hour until it cured. The beauty and horror of Rockite is the speed at which

Material Obsessions

it dries. If you do everything right you will soon be rewarded, but a false move spells disaster: a lost formwork, a mess on the floor, a

inside it. Heat radiated off the cube, the signal of the metamorphosis that just took place. The flowing liquid now frozen in solid walls.

diminished spirit.

There were no seams, no glue lines, no frayed edges. It was one.

Looking back on this moment I am glad I spent twelve hours making a formwork that could have achieved the same had I only spent a fraction of that time making it. This mold was the foundation for every mold I came to make in school and every mold I will come to make for the rest of my life. The formwork is ninety-nine percent of the project. It is nearly everything. You must treat the formwork like the outcome because it generates the outcome. Within the hollow space of that formwork was beauty yet to be realized. I began to delicately remove the formwork as I had designed it. Brace by brace, wall by wall, the form collapsed around the now solid piece

This is what I mean to say that material changes everything.

Material Obsessions

Every day I would walk to studio from my home on Main Street and pass by the construction site of the new dormitory on Kent Street.

cables, hovering two stories above the ground. From a distance I could barely make out the cables. It was as if the beam floated in the

Each time I would notice the incremental progress being made, and though these quick snapshots would grab my attention for a

air, weightless. The crane pressed down on the earth, four legs reaching out to stabilize its mass. The crane began to move the beam

moment it was never enough for me to stop. Construction is slow, and that always bothered me. It seems as if buildings only get made

across the site and into place on the steel skeleton of the building. As the beam lowered, it met a welder perched atop a ladder two

in the past. By the time a building is finished the design is already a year to five years old, maybe even older. I saw the construction

stories high. Sparks began to surround the welder as he melded steel to steel, the beam still hanging from the crane. I was entranced

site as something very static. The images I gathered in my head played out like a stop motion film. The process I witnessed was never

by it all. The juxtaposition of scale and mass fascinated me: the crane grounded to the earth, the beam made weightless, and the man

fluid, but broken up into pieces by my walk to and from campus.

between them all, my only reference to scale and reality.

One day in the early fall on my usual walk home I stopped. A massive crane was on the site. A steel beam was suspended from its

I play this sequence back in my head over and over again. There is a story being told in the movement of all its pieces. The still images

Material Obsessions

previously ingrained in my mind were replaced with the motion of the beam swinging across the site and the sparks of the welder’s

constructing buildings is more interesting than buildings themselves. This is different than to say the process is the idea because

torch flashing off the steel. It is like watching a performance; each piece moving independently but to the same rhythm, together

ideas about buildings precede building. In this instance I am referring only to the actual sequence of constructing architecture, not

making something whole. I find it a beautiful thought to think that the construction workers are like dancers building the stages they

the ideas about how a building should be constructed. When I think about the way I make projects, it is always so important to me to

perform on. However, dance is an ephemeral art. Dance exists only in the moment that it is happening. After the last dancer leaves

think about the setting the project is going to be made in, the way I move around the project, and the way the pieces of the project

the stage, the stage is empty, it is just how you found it. The process of constructing a building leaves something behind that was not

come together. Even the music I listen to is very crucial; it gives the movement rhythm and timing. I want it all to be so beautiful that

there in the beginning.

when it is over you long for that movement once again.

I wanted to treat the process of construction as something that is more than a means to an end, and maybe even dare to say that

Material Obsessions

I believe that the formwork is architecture. Within the voided space of the formwork is a building and within the voided space of a building is the formwork. The two are so distinctly inseparable yet stand so far apart at the same time- they can never exist in the same moment. However, if one begets the other, then both must be the same. The formwork should be able to exist without the presence of cast material. Formworks are not machines for building-making, they are buildings themselves. They are just one reality of the building yet to be cast, and when I began to understand this, my love for process deepened. After a cast object has cured, I remove the formwork and rebuild it again. Each piece is delicately pulled off and set aside. The walls of the mold, now covered in residue and still hot from the exothermic reaction of the concrete, come back together again as a monument to what it just created.

Material Obsessions

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Material Obsessions

Material Obsessions

Va Dove Ti Porta il Cono Va Dove Ti Porta il Cono or Go Where Your Cone Takes You is a multi-sensory installation realized in Riva San Vitale, Switzerland in 2019.

In a design/build effort that comes to fruition over the course of just one week, time was as valuable a resource as any. It has become

While our original estimate of thirty cones wasn’t very far off, the prototyping process took many more iterations than expected. If we

clear that the way we dealt with uncertainty resulted in excessive trips to the hardware store, which were significant hits to productivity.

accounted for a 15% contingency on top of our expected number we would have saved ourselves a trip to the Brico, and developed

While these trips did result in a few unforeseen solutions, such as stumbling upon the existence of gold sticker paper, coordinating a

the casting process quicker. What we thought was a prudent approach to budgeting was actually naive, and cost us time we could

drive over was not a convenient task. The primary goal of our project was to set aside as much of the budget as possible for gelato.

have spent on other things, such as prototyping the “game” before installation. Since our intervention was so heavily predicated on

The more efficiently we could spend our money, the more gelato we could give out.We made an educated guess at how many

provoking people to do something, it would have been important to prototype this interaction beforehand.

concrete cones we would need in the tree, and bought cement, plastic cups and spoons in accordance with that estimate. We should have purchased a bit more than necessary, but were reluctant to do so in an attempt to limit all ancillary expenses beside the gelato.

Va Dove Ti Porta il Cono

Va Dove Ti Porta il Cono

Recreation Center in Lugano Completed during Studio Residency program at the Steger Center in Riva San Vitale, Switzerland, the Recreation Center in Lugano asks the question can the history of a place be translated into a phenomenological experience.

The foundation of architecture is beauty. This much I know to be true. Beautiful things last forever, but the buildings that are being built now do not. Too often buildings are destroyed before their useful life is over. Their unsustainable materials seem designed for failure and destined for a second life as trash. The materials we use should look like the Earth they come from and the buildings they make should evoke the same Earth. And if buildings do not last forever, then what we take from the Earth we must return. I want to make buildings that look 100 years old on the day they are completed and just completed on the day they turn 100. I imagine these buildings forming like the great mountains of the Alps and Himalayas. I want them to be built over the span of a million years, perhaps never completed at all, this way their beauty might last forever.

Three Towers for Three Gongs in the Forest

Though mystified in folklore, a wolf’s howl is simply primal instinct. Wolves can be separated by miles when hunting, yet a distinct howl can break the silence of the forest and reunite a whole pack

Poster Design