Fabrizio Furiassi is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the University of Basel, where he teaches within the MA in Critical Urbanisms and coordinates the AA Visiting School Basel, a joint programme of the Urban Studies division and the AA School of Architecture in London. He works at the intersection of academia and practice and has over ten years of international experience at design firms and cultural institutions. Fabrizio graduated in architecture and urbanism from La Sapienza University of Rome (BSc and MArch), Columbia University GSAPP in New York (MSc), and completed the postgraduate research program at the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He is the founder of Distributed Architecture, a New York-based design and research practice focusing on participatory design projects. Fabrizio’s recent awards include the Independent Projects Grant from the Architectural League of NY and New York State Council on the Arts, the GSAPP Incubator Prize from Columbia University, and the Doc.CH and the Mobility Research Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Fabrizio’s doctoral thesis “Mafia, Concrete, Territory: A Material History of Power in Sicily, 1945-1992” questions the role of architects and planners since Italy's postwar building boom, identifying the Mafia’s monopoly on the industry of concrete as a key factor in the rapid urbanization of the region. With the combination of archival research, oral history, and ethnographic methods, the project analyses the transformations of the Sicilian territory by tracing the trajectory of concrete constructions to the very landscapes where the aggregates of concrete were sourced. Concrete is examined not as a static product but as continuous with the land and people that shape its transition from liquid to solid. As such, the thesis centralizes the crucial agency of materials in historical and social changes, showing how the form and condition of Sicily have been regulated by nontraditional actors otherwise considered external to the discipline’s discourse and practice. An introduction to the project was published in Log 53: Why Italy Now?