Cecilia Furlan is an architect, urban designer and researcher. Her work is directed toward understanding the interrelation between environmental dynamics and urbanisation.
Her primary research and teaching goals are directed toward understanding the interrelation between environmental dynamics, climate change and the urbanisation processes, particularly in the di use contexts. Currently, she is reflecting on the role of land and space in the circularity lens for cities and regions. She has often adopted a mapping and research by design approach to addressing this goal. Through this approach, she has tried integrating ongoing research subjects with design investigations developed from practice and student works, such as studios and graduation thesis. This allowed her to assess design as a “knowledge producer directly”.
She holds advanced degrees in architecture from the IUAV University of Venice, Italy, and a Post-Graduate master’s in Urbanism (European Postgraduate Master in Urbanism) from the IUAV University of Venice and KU Leuven. She received her joint PhD in Urbanism between KUL and IUAV. Her work has been funded, published internationally, and exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016 and 2018. She was called to be visiting researcher at UC Louvain, USI Antwerp and won the AESOP Young Investigator Training Program Award 2019. Finally, in 2019 she was selected as one of the winners of the EUROPAN15 design competition with a landscape urbanism project that integrates landscape interventions with urban design ones.
Currently, she is a senior researcher and lecturer in the Environmental Technology and Design section. She also collaborated as a researcher at the University of Antwerp and Universität für Bodenkultur Wien (tenure track), bridging research, practice and education to construct knowledge on how a circular economy can spatially restructure urbanised areas.
Selected thesis projects that Cecilia has supervised:
– Veras, M. (2020). Watering the Semiarid. Designing a Wetness Retention Landscape in Jaguaribara, Brazil