"The Last Supper of the Midwest: Staging Rituals and Revolt in a Carpenter-Gothic Farmhouse" a Lecture by Filippo Falciotti / TPOD
Event details
| Date | 13.10.2025 |
| Hour | 18:00 › 20:00 |
| Speaker | Filippo Falciotti |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
Abstract
Grant Wood, a central figure in the “Regionalist Triumvirate” and best remembered for American Gothic (1930), painted Dinner for Threshers in 1934. Though often overlooked, the work is emblematic in its engagement with typological and social themes, as well as its nuanced representation of domesticity. Emerging during the Great Depression and shaped by a broader cultural project of emancipation, Regionalism sought to ground American identity in local realities. Wood’s painting enacts his own “Revolt Against the City” by anchoring its subjects in the rituals of rural life. While the farmhouse has traditionally been analyzed either in economic terms or through its architectural features, this lecture will shift attention to its representational dimension, interpreting it in dialogue with Wood’s broader body of work—his images, writings, and housing experiments. The lecture will offer a layered reading of the painting, presenting the sectioned interior as the stage of a domestic temple, where both architecture and human figures are abstracted and function as vessels of collective memory. Drawing on early Italian pictorial traditions, Wood transformed the harvest meal into a tableau rich in religious symbolism: humble, mass-produced utensils—borrowed from both childhood memory and mail-order catalogues—become ritual objects in their own right. While the farmhouse has traditionally been analyzed either in economic terms or through its architectural features, this lecture will shift attention to its representational dimension, interpreting it in dialogue with Wood’s broader body of work—his images, writings, and housing experiments. Through the combined use of digital reconstruction and iconological as well as semiotic inquiry, this lecture will advance the notion of analogous reading: an interpretive practice that situates the work within a field of relational and associative correspondences. Rather than isolating formal details, it seeks to understand how each compositional decision operates as part of a lexicon of counter-discourse, articulating Wood’s artistic and political vision. In this sense, the analogous is not a metaphorical device but a mode of association—an instrument through which images, forms, and meanings become structurally bound to one another.
Bio
Filippo Fanciotti is an architect, artist, and PhD candidate at the Laboratory of Arts for Sciences (LAPIS) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). His doctoral research investigates digital architecturalrepresentation both as a critical framework for analyzing images as repositories of spatial and material data and as a pedagogical tool for teaching Art and Architectural History. At EPFL, he is chargé de cours in Théorie et techniques de la figuration architecturale and head of Archives de l’Imaginaire, under the direction of Nicola Braghieri. He has previously taught Digital Form and Movement at the Institut für Architektur und Medien, Technische Universität Graz, and led a design studio at the Polytechnic School of the University of Genoa. He is the editor of Promenades dans Rome (Silvana Editoriale, 2023) and of CONTROFIRENZE68 (Silvana Editoriale, forthcoming), a project supported by the Italian Council 13 grant. Fanciotti is co-founder of the architecture collective False Mirror Office, through which he engages in workshops, exhibitions, research, and design practice. Alongside his independent work as a visualizer and architect, he has collaborated with the Milan-based studio P-A-N, the Genoa-based studio una2 architetti associati, and MVRDV in Rotterdam. His artistic practice as a painter has been represented by Lariot Collective (London, Madrid) since 2021, andremains in active dialogue with his digital art production and research, with which it shares both processes and operational tools—most notably the use of thematic atlases conceived as instruments for constructing discourses through images.
Image: Grant Wood’s Dinner for Threshers. Reconstruction drawn by Filippo Fanciotti.
Grant Wood, a central figure in the “Regionalist Triumvirate” and best remembered for American Gothic (1930), painted Dinner for Threshers in 1934. Though often overlooked, the work is emblematic in its engagement with typological and social themes, as well as its nuanced representation of domesticity. Emerging during the Great Depression and shaped by a broader cultural project of emancipation, Regionalism sought to ground American identity in local realities. Wood’s painting enacts his own “Revolt Against the City” by anchoring its subjects in the rituals of rural life. While the farmhouse has traditionally been analyzed either in economic terms or through its architectural features, this lecture will shift attention to its representational dimension, interpreting it in dialogue with Wood’s broader body of work—his images, writings, and housing experiments. The lecture will offer a layered reading of the painting, presenting the sectioned interior as the stage of a domestic temple, where both architecture and human figures are abstracted and function as vessels of collective memory. Drawing on early Italian pictorial traditions, Wood transformed the harvest meal into a tableau rich in religious symbolism: humble, mass-produced utensils—borrowed from both childhood memory and mail-order catalogues—become ritual objects in their own right. While the farmhouse has traditionally been analyzed either in economic terms or through its architectural features, this lecture will shift attention to its representational dimension, interpreting it in dialogue with Wood’s broader body of work—his images, writings, and housing experiments. Through the combined use of digital reconstruction and iconological as well as semiotic inquiry, this lecture will advance the notion of analogous reading: an interpretive practice that situates the work within a field of relational and associative correspondences. Rather than isolating formal details, it seeks to understand how each compositional decision operates as part of a lexicon of counter-discourse, articulating Wood’s artistic and political vision. In this sense, the analogous is not a metaphorical device but a mode of association—an instrument through which images, forms, and meanings become structurally bound to one another.
Bio
Filippo Fanciotti is an architect, artist, and PhD candidate at the Laboratory of Arts for Sciences (LAPIS) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). His doctoral research investigates digital architecturalrepresentation both as a critical framework for analyzing images as repositories of spatial and material data and as a pedagogical tool for teaching Art and Architectural History. At EPFL, he is chargé de cours in Théorie et techniques de la figuration architecturale and head of Archives de l’Imaginaire, under the direction of Nicola Braghieri. He has previously taught Digital Form and Movement at the Institut für Architektur und Medien, Technische Universität Graz, and led a design studio at the Polytechnic School of the University of Genoa. He is the editor of Promenades dans Rome (Silvana Editoriale, 2023) and of CONTROFIRENZE68 (Silvana Editoriale, forthcoming), a project supported by the Italian Council 13 grant. Fanciotti is co-founder of the architecture collective False Mirror Office, through which he engages in workshops, exhibitions, research, and design practice. Alongside his independent work as a visualizer and architect, he has collaborated with the Milan-based studio P-A-N, the Genoa-based studio una2 architetti associati, and MVRDV in Rotterdam. His artistic practice as a painter has been represented by Lariot Collective (London, Madrid) since 2021, andremains in active dialogue with his digital art production and research, with which it shares both processes and operational tools—most notably the use of thematic atlases conceived as instruments for constructing discourses through images.
Image: Grant Wood’s Dinner for Threshers. Reconstruction drawn by Filippo Fanciotti.
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- Pier Vittorio Aureli