The contribution to disciplinary culture of artist and architect Vittorio Giorgini has remained concealed to wide architecture audiences. This talk focuses on the research branch concerning shell structures and surface topology that he developed between the late fifties and the mid-eighties. I contextualize his trajectory by critically examining a number of aspects that played a central role in the construction of his artistic ideology, such as his involvement with the so-called “Florentine School,” his subsequent encounter with André Bloc, and his referents in the fields of art and architecture (from Kiesler to Moore, Klee and Matta, among others). I further show that what sets Giorgini apart from designers like Kiesler and Bloc—and from the whole of the Florentine School for that matter—was the fact that, behind the sculptural, seemingly whimsical appearance of his shell structure designs there was a consistent geometric logic. In the tradition of D’Arcy Thompson’s biological structuralism, Giorgini looked to the living world with a view to grasp its organizational structures, rather than to seek formal imitation of external appearances. His fascination with nature became a heuristic device that triggered a restless search for geometric structure in design. In my reading, such a structural quality was closely tied to the singularity of Giorgini’s project, in the sense of yielding a self-determined formal vocabulary that fell outside the framework of codified linguistic formats.