Emilio Faroldi _ Preface

One becomes an architect through education, learning, and the decisive role played by the transmission of experience from those who have already traveled certain paths. Likewise, there are figures who are born architects, meaning those who answer to both nuances contained in the term itself. Archí(αρχή) indicates command or primacy, such as chief or first; Téktōn (τέκτων) designates a builder, craftsman, maker, or someone engaged in action and operative practice. What everyone recognizes in Alberto Seassaro, hidden among the eclectic and layered micro and macro-histories that mark his personal story, is the rare ability to construct a trajectory aimed at delineating the disciplinary autonomy of the field of design from the structurally foundational and historically structuring realm of architecture. This path reached its highest expression with the founding of the Faculty of Design and, subsequently, with the promotion and introduction, within the arduous magma of ministerial frameworks, of the Scientific Disciplinary Sector of Design: a development with far-reaching consequences for academic careers and for the future of entire generations of designers in the most contemporary senses that the term now evokes.