7 April 2014

Don’t let yourself be deceived by the carefree and unconventional image of the surfing community: the shape of their boards could hardly be more traditional. With the exception of the customization of their surfaces with decorations and patterns, the appearance of boards has not changed for decades. Giulio Iacchetti has reappraised the model with the help of an expert, Francesco Aldo Fiorentino of Surfer’s Den, the favorite Milanese hangout for lovers of the waves. The idea of Surfph-o-Morph is to draw on the morphology of large fish and cetaceans to ensure an optimal performance in terms of fluid dynamics, something that can be achieved today in part thanks to the use of numerical control machines. The formal analogy with marine animals is an exemplary use of functionalist logic and has also been applied to the design of the fins, which imitate those of the animal in question (shark, killer whale, dolphin). In any case, at the end of the 19th century, the father of functionalism Horatio Greenough had already drawn on the morphological metaphor of the boat as fish to explain that biology is the rational basis of any structuring of form that is going to last in time. And now it will be surfers who have the last word. You can go to see the boards at the Surfer’s Den, Piazza Caduti del Lavoro 5, on the evening of Saturday April 12, from 10:30 pm onward.