Marco Casagrande

Marco Casagrande is a Finnish architect, environmental artist, social theorist and professor of architecture born in 1971 in Turku, Finland. He graduated from the Helsinki University of Technology Department of Architecture in 2001. From the early stages of his career Casagrande started to mix architecture with other disciplines of art and science landing with a series of ecologically conscious architectural installations around the world. Starting from 1999 he has created 65 cross-disciplinary, original and radical works within 14 years.

The widely published works have been exhibited three times in the Venice Biennale (2000, 2004 and 2006) and in Havana Biennale 2000, Firenze Biennial 2001, Yokohama Triennial 2001, Montreal Biennial 2002, Puerto Rico Biennial 2002, Demeter Hokkaido 2002, Alaska Design Forum 2003, Echigo-Tsumari Triennial 2003, Taipei on the Move 2004, London Architecture Biennial 2004, Sensoria Melbourne 2004, Taiwan Design Expo 2005, Urban Flashes Mumbai 2006, 7-ELEVEN City 2007, World Architecture Festival 2009, Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennial 2009 and 2012, Victoria & Albert Museum 2010, World Design Expo 2011, Beufort04 Triennial 2012, Austrian Museum of Contemporary Art MAK “Eastern Promises” 2013, Buenos Aires Architecture Biennial 2013 and China Central Academy of Fine Arts CAFAM Biennale 2014 among others.

The works have been awarded in the Architectural Review’s Emerging Architecture 1999, Borromini Award 2000, Mies Van Der Rohe Award 2001, Lorenzo Il Magnifico Award 2001, La Nuit Du Livre Award 2006, World Architecture Community Awards 2009, World Architecture Festival Award 2009, Architectural Review House Award 2010, World Architecture Community Awards 2010, Red Dot Design Awards 2012 and Russian Architects Union’s Zeleny Proekt (Green Project) 2012 competitions. Marco Casagrande is the laureate of the 2013 European Prize for Architecture and he won the International Committee of Architectural Critics CICA Award 2013 for conceptual and artistic architecture.

Casagrande’s works and teaching are moving freely in-between architecture, landscape architecture, environmental art, urban and environmental design and science, and circus adding up into cross-over architectural thinking of «commedia dell’architettura», a broad vision of built human environment tied into social drama and environmental awareness. «There is no other reality than nature». He views architects as design shamans merely interpreting what the bigger nature of the shared mind is transmitting.

Marco Casagrande has been lecturing, running workshops and being in charge of design and research courses and studios in all together 61 universities or international conferences in 23 countries on disciplines of environmental art, architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, sociology and on multidisciplinary courses. The universities include the Tokyo University Tadao Ando Laboratory, Aalto University Department of Environmental Art, Helsinki University of Art and Design and Bergen School of Architecture. He was a visiting professor at the Taiwanese Tamkang University 2004-2008 and currently runs an independent multidisciplinary research centre Ruin Academy in Taipei in cooperation with the Aalto University’s SGT Sustainable Global Technologies Centre. Casagrande views cities as complex energy organisms in which different overlapping layers of energy flows are determining the actions of the citizens as well as the development of the city. By mixing environmentalism and urban design Casagrande is developing methods of punctual manipulation of the urban energy flows in order to create an ecologically sustainable urban development towards the so-called 3rd Generation City. The theory of the Third Generation City views the future urban development as the ruin of the industrial city, an organic machine ruined by nature including human nature. Casagrande describes urban acupuncture as: «a cross-over architectural manipulation of the collective sensuous intellect of a city. City is viewed as multi-dimensional sensitive energy-organism, a living environment. Urban acupuncture aims into a touch with this nature. » and: «Sensitivity to understand the energy flows of the collective chi beneath the visual city and reacting on the hot-spots of this chi. Architecture is in the position to produce the acupuncture needles for the urban chi. » and: «A weed will root into the smallest crack in the asphalt and eventually break the city. Urban acupuncture is the weed and the acupuncture point is the crack. The possibility of the impact is total, connecting human nature as part of nature. The theory opens the door for uncontrolled creativity and freedom. Ruin is something man-made having become part of nature. »

Currently Marco Casagrande is the Principal of the Casagrande Laboratory Architects in Finland and WEAK! in Taiwan together with Prof. Roan Ching-Yueh and architect Hsieh Ying-Chun. He directs the independent multidisciplinary research center Ruin Academy based in Taipei, Taiwan and Artena, Italy. Marco Casagrande is the Vice President of the International Society of Biourbanism.