STUDIO PAOLA VIGANO — new location

The City Territory: a renewable resource

– reflection by Rudy Luijters

Paola Viganò is an Italian architect and urban planner, and professor at the universities of Lausanne and Venice. She obtained a PhD in ‘architecture and urban composition’ from the University of Venice. In 1989 she became an teaching assistant for the urban planning courses of Bernardo Secchi at the same university. A year later, they founded Studio Associato Bernardo Secchi Paola Viganò, which realised various architecture and urban development projects in Europe. After Secchi passed away in 2014, Viganò decided to move on with Studio Paola Viganò.

Studio specialises in urban development and works on different scales to fully comprehend urban design. A vision is developed based on a sense of how people want to live, on the one hand, but also by considering the entire urban and territorial complexities, on the other. The office designed various projects in Belgium, including the Theatre square and Park Spoor Noord in Antwerp, Hostel Wadi and the associated masterplan for De Hoge Rielen in Kasterlee and the public space of the Lamot site in Mechelen.

In 2008, Studio was one of the ten selected teams for the research on 'le Grand Paris'. Since then, Studio has realized different visions for large metropolises such as 'New Moscow', Lille 2030, Montpellier 2040… With a revolutionary proposal of a no car city, the 'Brussels 2040' project showed new and unimagined development opportunities for the capital. Together with the University of Liège, Paola Viganò was recently appointed to prepare a masterplan for the reconstruction of the Vesdre Valley, the epicenter of the floods in July 2021. During the lecture, Paola Viganò will present the status of this study. The projects are testimony to their way of working in which they understand the urban area in the broad sense as a renewable residue.

In 2016 Paola Viganò received the Ultima Prize for Architecture, a Flemish Culture Prize. That same year she received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from UCL.

Reflection by Rudy Luijters | Rudy Luijters is a botanist, landscape philosopher and artist. He lives and works in Brussels and publishes on topics related to public space and landscape. With Atelier Veldwerk (in collaboration with Onno Dirker), he works on projects on a small and large scale, such as the design of the landscape concept and the naturals elements for the Zwin Park.