Virginia San Fratello

Virginia San Fratello is an educator, designer and creative technologist. She is the Chair of the Department of Design at San Jose State University in Silicon Valley and an International Interior Design Association (IIDA) Educator of the Year recipient. She is a design activist, author, and thought leader within the fields of additive manufacturing, architecture, interior and product design. She has served in the role of Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arkansas and The University of Queensland. In 2014 her creative practice, Rael San Fratello (with Ronald Rael), was named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York—one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture. In 2016 Rael San Fratello was also awarded the Digital Practice Award of Excellence by the The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). In 2020 Rael San Fratello received an Art + Technology Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In 2020 the Pink Borderwall Teeter Totters installed on the border between the USA and Mexico, designed by Rael and San Fratello, was awarded the Beasley Design of the Year Award.

San Fratello is the co-author of Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing (Princeton Architectural Press 2018), a book that reexamines the building process from the bottom up and offers illuminating case studies for 3D printing with materials like chardonnay grape skins, salt and sawdust. She is also a partner in Emerging Objects, a creatively driven, 3D Printing MAKE-tank specializing in innovations in 3D printing architecture, building components, environments and products (a short documentary of their work can be seen here).

Her work with Rael has been published widely, including in the New York Times, Wired, MARK, Domus, Metropolis Magazine, PRAXIS, Interior Design, Domus, the Architects Newspaper, the  Public Art Review, and recognized by several institutions including: LACMA, The National Building Museum, the Red Dot Design Museum, the Bellevue Museum, For Freedoms, the YBCA 100, and included in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Design Museum in London.

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Every Monday, Olson Kundig starts the week with an all‑office meeting, and once a month this meeting is devoted to an outside guest speaker. The Olson Kundig Speaker Series was created by Alan Maskin over two decades ago with the goal of inspiring staff with presentations from people who work outside the realm of architecture. To date, more than 300 guests have come to speak in our offices. The forum is also available for internal speakers, who share completed project overviews, complex project details, and research findings, all with the aim of increasing our shared knowledge.

The 2023 theme of The Speaker Series is Other Plans. Other Plans is a retelling of stories untold which capture the unexpected moments in time that have altered our narratives. These are the plot twists, the detours, the pivots that challenge us to tap into the truest versions of ourselves and press on toward the future — even if that future is a vastly different destination to where we had planned. At its core, Other Plans is an examination of the human condition to better understand how each individual responds and adapts in the face of change.