Antonio Scarponi (Rimini, Italy, 1974) is an architect and designer, founder of Conceptual Devices, a Zurich based office for resilient design, architecture and urban development.
He studied architecture at Cooper Union, New York and at IUAV, Venice from which he holds a PhD in urban design. He conceives design and architecture as an interdisciplinary cultural tool that can address complex social, political, economic and ecological space-related challenges. His projects take the forms of narrations that engage local communities, industries, agencies.
In the past years, he has been active worldwide in the field of resilient urban strategies with a strong focus on urban agriculture. He designed several soilless urban agricultural projects at different scales of interventions. He is the author of ELIOOO (2014) an instruction manual about how to subvert the IKEA worldwide distribution infrastructure to create a product that does not exists made with found IKEA parts to grow food with hydroponics. This book has been translated in German, Japanese and Russian. Antonio Scarponi is also co-founder of Hic et Nunc (www.hic-et-nunc.me) - a “verain” with the mission to engage design students with fieldwork social design experiences, for which received the best of the year in category design from Hochparterre in 2017.