Francesco is an architect and chartered structural engineer specialised in tall building design, structural optimization and performance-based seismic design.
In 2013 he earned a double master’s degree with honors in Architecture and Building Engineering at the University of Naples ‘Federico II’, with a thesis on the form-finding of post-formed timber grid-shells using generative algorithms.
In 2015, he honed his structural engineering knowledge with a 2nd level Master degree in Emerging Technologies for Construction (METeC) at the University of Naples ‘Federico II’ and the University of California, Berkeley, researching shear-link energy dissipators for seismic design.
From 2015 to 2018, he worked for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) in the San Francisco and London offices, where he was the design engineer of a wide range of projects in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and China. Along with the engineering of complex and challenging building structures, he studied and developed an innovative viscous damping system, new performance-based design techniques and several structural design tools.
In 2017, he joined the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design (ILEK) at the University of Stuttgart as research assistant for four months, where he studied the automated production of Functionally Graded Concrete walls for thermal and structural optimization and was the main author and developer of the topology optimization software ATOMuS.
From October 2018 to September 2023, Francesco was a PhD candidate at the Institute of Technology in Architecture at ETH Zurich, where he was a research assistant in the Block Research Group and NCCR Digital Fabrication.
In 2023, Francesco co-founded with Prof. Block and Dr. Tom Van Mele and became CEO of the ETH spinoff VAULTED AG, which commercialises the Rippmann Floor System, a low-embodied-emission, fully circular floor solution.
