Best of Two Worlds

Duality of heritage, interests mark the work of Del Giudice

Our daily lives are often a careful negotiation between opposing forces and for Veronica Del Giudice, these pushes and pulls manifest themselves in her work as a designer and intern architect.
Although she loves the creative, intellectual exercise that is architecture, Del Giudice is also attracted to the more immediate hit of designing functional ceramic objects. So on most Saturdays, after a full week of work at Levitt Goodman Architects of Toronto, Del Giudice sequesters herself in a west Toronto studio in search of "moments of immediate design expression".
"It's like I'm unlocking the destiny of what the clay wants to be," the 28-year-old Del Giudice says of her ceramic work. She began working with the material four years ago and the gift shop of the Art Gallery of Ontario has recently begun to sell her designs. Working with both high-fire and low-fire clays and glazes (the high-fire approach yields more intense colours), Del Giudice wants to create work that is both functional and beautiful. Her recent designs include pitchers, vases and sushi plates with built-in wells for soy sauce and grooves for chopsticks. (She's a big fan of Japanese culture.)
"I try to take a humanistic approach and really think about how your head interacts with the piece," she says. Her approach is modelled after the exceptional work of Finnish design masters Tapio Wirkkala and Juhani Pallasmaa. Del Giudice was able to learn about Pallasmaa's work first-hand when she studied in Finland in 1998 during her fourth year in the University of Waterloo's architecture program. She also admires the work of Japanese-American furniture designer George Nakashima, whose wood designs made prominent use of natural textures.
The Finnish experience was of particular significance to Del Giudice, whose father Ermanno emigrated to Toronto at age 18 from Terracina. Her mother Salme is from the Finnish town of Puumala. (The couple-to-be met at a New Year's Eve party in Toronto in the early 1960s.) In a wonderful bit of luck, Del Giudice's Finnish study, which included work with a Helsinki architectural firm, was preceded by four months' study in Rome in the fall of 1997. "Being able to confront my two halves simultaneously was really quite powerful," Del Giudice recalled recently over a latte macchiato at Bar Italia on Toronto's College Street. She lived with fellow students in an apartment overlooking the Gianicolo botanical gardens and on a few occasions travelled to her aunt's home in Terracina where she remembers comforting meals such as fresh fish from the sea. She also recalls hill towns such as Gubbio, Orvieto, Todi and Perugia as "absolutely breathtaking". Her favourite Italian architects include Carlo Scarpa and Renzo Piano.
Despite the instant gratification she gets from creating ceramic objects (she would also like to produce glass blown pieces in the future), Del Giudice is not about to forsake the serious architectural work at Levitt Goodman, a firm which she says has "a soul and a conscience". Principals Janna Levitt and Dean Goodman focus on issues such as sustainable design and special needs housing in their work. The firm is also known for its innovative use of materials, an approach on display in a concept space at last winter's Interior Design Show.
Del Giudice is currently producing the working drawings of Peel Youth Village, a four-storey shelter for troubled youths in Mississauga. The Highway 410 and Britannia Road complex will feature a community and counselling centre, as well as emergency and transitional housing for area teens who at present must seek refuge in Toronto. Del Giudice also admires the work of Samuel Mockbee, an American architect and academic who focused on providing affordable housing in impoverished areas of the state of Alabama. It's an approach to architecture - providing for basic human needs for shelter rather than trying to be the next media sensation - that motivates Del Giudice, who has found like minds at Levitt Goodman.
Born in Willowdale and raised in Woodbridge, Del Giudice wanted to be an architect since the sixth grade. Her father, now retired from his work as a building site superintendent, built the family cottage at Fenelon Falls over a number of summers and Del Giudice remembers helping out where she could along with her younger sister Laura, who is now a planning ecologist with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. Their mother continues to work as an accountant.
In the summer of 2000, Del Giudice co-designed and curated Roma XX, an exhibition held in the galleria at Toronto's BCE Place which celebrated the 20th anniversary of the University of Waterloo's Rome study program. Each fall the school sends 45 to 60 architecture students to the Italian capital to study the country's architecture and culture. Roman architects and artists are invited to participate in the exchange. The school maintains a studio and library in the Piazza Santa Maria, Trastevere. The exhibition project led to an assignment to provide research assistance to architectural writers Beth Kapusta and John McMinn for a book about the Yolles engineering firm of Toronto.
Del Giudice's architectural thesis project for architecture school was a thoughtful proposal for a cemetery to be located in a Finnish archipelago region. Drawing on Finnish mythology, Del Giudice's plan provided for a funereal procession from a mainland site to an island burial. The thesis received an award from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.
Del Giudice sees herself as the beneficiary of the best of two worlds - a quiet precision characteristic of her Finnish roots and a joyous and feisty passion shared among Italian peoples. To be sure, it is a duality to be envied in the world of architecture and design.

Publication Date: 2003-04-13
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2594