Franca Trubiano

Franca Trubiano is Associate Professor and a Registered Architect with l'Ordre des Architectes du Québec. She completed her Ph.D. in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. At present, she is a member of the Mellon Humanities Urbanism and Design (H+U+D) Initiative at Penn where she conducts funded research in the area of ‘Building Ethics and Construction Labor.’ She is also funded by the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy for developing policy issues related to ‘Fossil Fuels, the Building Industry, and Human Health.’ And in 2019, she was appointed to the Penn Fellows program, “a select group of outstanding mid-career faculty members.”

In collaboration with graduates from the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Franca has recently completed the edited book Women [Re}Build; Stories, Polemics, Futures to be published by ORO - AR+D Publishing in Fall 2019. Women [Re]-Build features and the words and works of leading women thinkers, activists, designers, and builders who have dared to ask, “where are the women?” Where are the women whose architectural work should be celebrated and recognized for its courage and impact; who have cultivated female leadership while challenging the very principles of the discipline they represent; and who’ve asked the most difficult and rigorous of questions of those who build their visions? Her current manuscript for Routledge, Building Theories, for a new Ethics of Architecture returns architectural theory to the art of building by addressing many of the contradictions now faced by designers, architects, engineers, and builders who negotiate overwhelming technological imperatives. Valorizing the as yet untapped potential of ‘thinking through building’, Building Theories sets the foundations for a critical return to the art of making that is architecture.