Paola Vigano is one of the key voices in the European debate on pressing issues of today’s urban development – questions that she addresses in her theoretical writings , but also gives answers as a practical planner.
As an urban planner, Paola Vigano took part in the major international urban development and restructuring competitions (Grand Paris, Bruxelles 2040, Antwerp, Moscow and Geneva) and decisively shaped them with her ideas – until 2014 together with Bernardo Secchi. As an architect, however, she has also designed a number of outstanding public buildings, squares and conversions of cultural institutions, such as the Theaterplein in Antwerp, realized together with Bernardo Secchi.
As a theoretician, she has been involved with her essays and writings in the discussion of central terms in the European urban debate over the past 25 years – for example in the critical examination of the ‘Città diffusa’. She had a decisive influence on the concept of a ‘porous city’, which has been important over the past ten years, and only recently with the publication on “The Horizontal Metropolis” she gave another impetus for the qualification of public space in a transformed urban landscape.
Itohan Osayimwese is an architectural and urban historian and Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at Brown University, Providence / USA. She engages with theories of modernity, postcoloniality, and globalization to analyze German colonial architecture, urban design, and visual culture; modern architecture in Germany; African and African diaspora material cultural histories; and the architecture of development in Africa. Another research interest is the architectural and urban lives of religious cults.
Her book, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, considers the effects of colonialism on the development of modern architecture in Germany from the 1850s until the 1930s. Her current book project, From Barbados to Boston, explores the transformative effects of migration on Anglo-Caribbean built environments and societies after Emancipation. Another book project introduces English-speaking scholars to the first German-language survey of African architecture published in 1894, and revises our understanding of the origins of the study of African art.
Keller Easterling is researching in the way the spatial production of our living environment is logistically balanced and overlaid with technological developments. She pursues this on a very high theoretical and linguistic level without losing sight of the specific social dimension and political potential of urban space.
With “Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades”she laid the theoretical foundation for a fresh yet critical view of the political gaps in the system of increasingly globalised architecture production. In “Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space” she examined the infrastructure network as a “community medium” and established ground-breaking points for the contemporary discussion on architecture and urban research.
Keller Easterling is considered to be one of the most important intellectual voices in the international discussion on architecture.
The Schelling Architecture Foundation recognizes the British-Canadian author Doug Saunders for the new perspective with which he explores the causes of basic parameters leading to the need for and the influences on new accommodation solutions for immigrants in Western societies. In doing so he has also developed basic principles for urban development that will ultimately determine the success or failure of our urban living conditions in the 21st century. In 2011 Doug Saunders recorded his observations and intensive research of the subject of migration in twenty metropolitan areas across all continents in the book „Arrival City“ and in 2012 in „The Myth of the Muslim Tide“.
Pallasmaa’s career – now spanning over nearly six decades – encompasses the full spectrum of building, teaching, writing, editing, lecturing and curating. The true fruit of Pallasmaa’s prodigious life-work lies patently in his thinking about architecture: that is, in his prolific and continuously evolving writing, as well as in his teaching of the discipline. Not surprisingly, Pallasmaa takes a clear stance with regard to moral imperatives in our discipline, considering the responsible rôle that architecture plays in its conditioning of lives.
