franco frescura

• Full autobiography
         Brief autobiography
• Executive CV
• Publications CV
• Interviews and reviews (under construction)
• Work in press (under construction)
• List of graphic work done (under construction)
• How others have seen him (under construction)

FRANCO FRESCURA

Abridged Biography

Franco Frescura was born in Trieste, Italy, in 1946 and nine years later his family emigrated to South Africa. He entered the Faculty of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1966 where, following a chequered undergraduate career, he obtained his BArch in 1977. In 1979 Prof Pancho Guedes appointed him to the teaching staff at Wits, and in 1980 he began to read towards an MArch. This was granted cum laude in 1981, and was followed by a PhD in 1986. Between 1976 and 1989 he documented the self-built architecture of indigenous communities living in rural South Africa, and his first book on the subject, Rural Shelter, was published by Ravan Press in 1981. Since 1978 he has published over 171 books and articles, 21 of which have appeared in peer-reviewed publications. Frescura has also lectured at the University of Port Elizabeth, and more recently was appointed to the Chair of Architecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is currently Senior Research Associate in Culture, Communication and Media Studies at the same institution. He has sat on a number of policy-making bodies, both national and regional, and from 1994–1999 he was Head of the Philatelic Section of the South African Post Office, where he directed the design and symbolic imagery of the nation’s stamps.