Professor Orsina Simona Pierini Appointed Honorary Research Fellow
The LIverpool,School of Architecture is pleased to annouce the appointment of Proffessor Orsina Simona Pierin as an Honorary Research Fellow.
Orsina Simona Pierini (1962) is Full Professor of Architectural Design at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU), Milan Polytechnic.
Her main research activity is based on an idea of architectural design that applies historical experience of architecture and the study of the city as unvarying materials and conditions that are reflected in contemporary projects. In this field, she has published the book “Sulla facciata, tra architettura e città” (2008), and the article “Divorzio all’italiana: sui concetti di luogo e storia in un progetto di Ignazio Gardella” (2013). The research in the field of criticism is always accompanied by broader reflections on composition, where interaction with other artistic disciplines is always fertile. This interest takes the form of the organization of seminars or the translation of the book by Carlos Martí Arís, “Silenzi eloquenti”. In coherence is the development of a line of work regarding the impacts of structural and constructive choices in the definition of an architectural language, as described in the work of Torroja and de la Sota.
The most recent research is focusing on the publication of an Atlas of the 20th century housing history, in a collaboration with an international group with Carmen Espegel, Mark Swenarton and Dirk van Gameren. She has addressed the importance of the role of housing in the urban design of the contemporary city in the study on the places of residence: the design of the home as an ongoing verification of the state of the art transposed in the project for the contemporary city. The most recent activity of investigation on the places of habitation has been aimed, more specifically, towards the theme of European housing. The activation of the exploration of the potentialities of housing design within the urban design of contemporary settlements has also led to the publication of the volume “Housing Primer. Le forme della residenza nella città contemporanea” (2012).
A line of this research is the critical reinterpretation and in-depth study of the works of the Modern masters, with the goal of finding possible lines of continuity; this analysis, has been applied to the works of the main masters of Spanish architecture as Sostres, Coderch, de la Sota, Torroja, to several architects of the 1950s in Milan, Gardella, Rogers and certain indispensable figures, such as Asplund, Le Corbusier or Mies; in this context, an anthology of selected writings of Luigi Moretti, “Spazio, gli editoriali ed altri scritti” (2019), has been recently published. This line also directed the studies on the housing in the city of Milan, structured in recent years in the research on the “Case Milanesi 1923-1973” (2017).
In continuity with this experience is also the recent participation in the Venice Biennale 2018, co-editor of the catalog Everyday Wonders, the Corso Italia Complex and the installation by Cino Zucchi on Luigi Caccia Dominioni.
She has lectured at several universities in Europe and elsewhere, including ETSAM and CEU Madrid, TUDelft, Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, ETSA Barcelona, EINA Zaragoza, the Polytechnic of Poznan, EAR Tarragona, KIT Karlsruhe, Beijing University of Technology, Henry Van de Velde Institut Antwerpen, Bauhaus Universität Weimar, CEPT Ahmedabad, Hochschule Luzern.