Wednesday 11 June 2025, 17.45 – 18.30, Department of Economics and Management, conference room
Eugenia Gasparri
Eugenia Gasparri is a Senior Lecturer in Architectural Technologies and Associate Dean of Research Education in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. Her research is multidisciplinary, applied and industry-oriented, with an emphasis on façade design and innovation to support the transition to net-positive built environments. She has a proven track record of research collaboration with the industry and esteemed research groups internationally and has secured over $3.5M in collaborative research grants to date. Her research on “Unitised Timber Envelopes” (UTE) is pioneering and has inspired market adoption of such systems across Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and Singapore. Since 2021, she worked with her team to establish “PHEBE Park”, the first façade testing facility at the University of Sydney. Eugenia is currently leading several multi-disciplinary projects towards research translation, including the awarded “ALGA Façade”, presented at TEDxSydney in 2024. She is the lead editor of “Rethinking Building Skins: Transformative Technologies and Research Trajectories”, an agenda-setting book on the future of building façades that brings together 60 global innovators from academia and industry.
Rethinking Building Skins: What’s Next on The Façade Horizon?
Facades play a pivotal role in architecture and the future of cities. They determine a building’s aesthetic appearance and its relationship with the surrounding urban context. By mediating between indoor and outdoor environments, facades significantly contribute to occupants’ comfort and well-being, buildings’ energy performance, environmental impact, and adaptation to climate change. Ultimately, facades dramatically influence construction process efficiency and safety, particularly in high-rises that have become prominent in our densely urbanized cities. Therefore, facades have enormous potential to drive the building sector’s transition to net zero and serve as perfect incubators for transformative innovation in construction.
In this talk, I will discuss opportunities and future research trajectories in facade design and construction through the lenses of both “product” and “process” innovation, envisioning a path towards a more sustainable and digitally integrated sector. I will then introduce some of my current projects on sustainable facade design and technology, emphasizing multi-disciplinarity and industry collaborations as key factors for innovation. My most recent work focuses on circular and regenerative facades to tackle the major challenges of future cities: increasingly high temperatures, more energy intensity, lack of fresh water, poor air quality, resource scarcity and food insecurity. Rethinking buildings as restorers rather than consumers is paramount to moving towards net-positive, resilient, and more equitable built environments.