Phd in ARCHITECTURE. THEORIES AND PROJECT

email: caterina.padoaschioppa@uniroma1.it
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Caterina Padoa Schioppa graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of Roma Tre in 2000 with Prof. Francesco Cellini, with a thesis on Melun Sénart’s Ville Nouvelle. In the following years she worked in Paris at Jean-Paul Viguier and Jean-Paul Philippon architectural firms, as well as in the landscape office Atelier Bruel-Delmar. In 2003 she continued her training with a Master in Landscape Urbanism at the Architectural Association in London. Back in Italy in 2006, she won the PhD grant at the Department of Design and Study of Architecture of Roma Tre. In 2010 she published with Aracne the PhD Thesis “Transcalarity and Adaptability in Landscape Urbanism”, which delves deeply into two principles – adaptability and transcalarity, whose roots can be traced in the most radical architectural and urban models of the 1960s – which concern indifferently the macroscopic and microscopic scale of the project, and introduce the temporal variable as its formal component.
If the research resembles a person’s temperament, that of Caterina Padoa Schioppa is restless and wandering, on the border between architecture, city and landscape, often in contact with the “waste landscapes” of the contemporary city, of which the disciplines of space have been dealing with since the 1990s. This theme – already addressed in the degree, master and doctoral thesis, as well as in various competition design – deals with the research carried out, in 2014-2016 Research Grants, with the QART Laboratory on the territories of the so-called Coda della Cometa and the Flaminia area in the city of Rome.
Within the complex and stratified articulation of geographies, dimensional leaps and thematic strands addressed in projects, research and didactic experiments, the lines of consistency are of methodological and instrumental. On a stylistic level – despite special “emotional bonds”, for example with timeless architectures that oscillate between modernity and regionalism – she intentionally cultivates the evolutionary and elusive character of language. After all, between modernity and regionalism lies the best architecture of post-Olympic China, subject of studies in recent years, whose most significant products are: the monograph on the landscape architect Kongjian Yu, founder of Turenscape (2019), and the monograph on architect Dong Gong, founder of Vector Architects (2020), both published with Libria.
Synthetically speaking, about method and tools, in every context (both as a designer and as a teacher), she stubbornly used diagrammatic manipulation (two- and three-dimensional, manual and digital) in order to investigate the internal rules of architecture (in the manner of Peter Eisenman) and explore the potential of abstract form, before its becoming architecture. She has dealt with the pedagogical value of the diagrammatic method and abstract language in numerous essays (among others, one on Bruno Zevi’s didactic experiments), even in relation to the modification of languages that “distance learning” during the pandemic has indirectly caused.
Before joining Sapienza University, she has taught at Roma Tre, at the Politecnico di Milano, at the Rome Program of the University of Waterloo, and at the Doctorate of Landscape in Florence.
She gave priority to the project – to the urban project in particular – in the academic and professional fields, not disdaining pure theoretical investigation, rather feeding on it to relate the practice, theory and political dimension of making architecture. She has constantly turned her interest towards social issues, sometimes of burning topicality, that architecture must be able to face with a visionary gaze, and yet effective, translatable into concrete experiences and material facts (even within the academic context). Such was the didactic-experimental experience within the Doctorate in 2008 (design compendium of the theoretical dissertation) that gave life to a small temporary multi-religious structure, built in self-construction with the students. Co-financed and promoted by the University, and with the patronage of the Municipality of Rome, the initiative aimed to raise awareness of the university community (but also the citizen) to the cultural and religious diversity.
After many years, the research at the Esquilino neighborhood in Rome, which involves her since 2020 together with a group of DiAP professors continues this thematic trend, in an urban reality where multi-ethnicity and diversity are well consolidated.
With an eye to the secular values of society, since 2019 she has been carrying out research on architectures for death, and in particular on the architecture of crematoria, of which our cities are lacking, not only in number, but also and above all in figurative and symbolic quality. This topic has been explored in doctoral seminars as well as in design competitions, and has been presented at international conferences and in various publications.
Finally, within the Design course in the second year of the Bachelor’s Degree in Architectural Sciences she deals with another emerging theme, probably related to the previous one, which concerns the aging of the population, particularly pronounced in Italy. students are proposed to design a multi-generational collective residence in Roman central neighborhoods.
She is a member of the Editorial Board of ArchiDiAP and of the Ardeth magazine.