Lina Malfona (1980), an architect and a scholar with a Ph.D. in Architectural and Urban Design studied at Sapienza University of Rome under Franco Purini, with whom she worked from 2005 to 2012. Since 2008, she has been both teaching as a visiting professor in Architectural Design Core Studios and working as a postdoctoral research fellow at Sapienza University of Rome. She has been guest and visiting critic at Cornell AAP, Columbia GSAPP, ENSA Paris Belleville, Harvard GSD, NYU, NYIT, RISD, Politecnico di Milano, Syracuse University, University of Pisa, and The University of Queensland. In December 2018, she has been appointed Associate Professor in Architectural and Urban Design at the University of Pisa, where she directs the research lab Polit(t)ico. Since 2007, she has been involved in drawing exhibitions and architectural competitions as team leader, receiving recognition and acclaim. She received an Honorable Mention for the competition “The Europe’s Become” (2013), and a Special Mention for the International Ideas Competition “Europan 12” (2014), she got the Second Prize for the Competition of Architectural Design “Lezioni di Campus” (2009), and she was among the 5 finalist in the competition “Meno è Più 3” (2006) for the design of collective facilities and public spaces in Rome. In 2015, she got the “Premio Giovani” National Award from the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca (Roma) for her built work. In 2007 she founded her firm, Malfona Petrini Architetti, together with Fabio and Simone Petrini. Their work – a series of case study homes in the Roman countryside – was awarded the prize “RomArchitettura” in 2014 and was published on architectural journals, among which The Plan, Architectural Record, Paesaggio Urbano and Anfione e Zeto. Bringing the long-neglected idea of the single-family home back into play within Italian architectural culture, this work has been recently published as the core of the book Building the Landscape. Residential Pavilions in the Roman Countryside (Lettera Ventidue, 2018). In this latest publication, Malfona reflects on the role of authorship in contemporary design, offering new perspectives on constructing the Italian landscape. Lina Malfona has pursued her research thanks to a number of prestigious post-doctoral research fellowships. In 2016, she was awarded the Fulbright Grant as a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she worked one year on her research project “Buiding Silicon Valley”, the topic of her forthcoming book. In 2017-18 she pursued her research thanks to a grant from The J. Paul Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. In 2015, she was awarded a grant as Visiting Fellow at the ATCH Center at the School of Architecture, The University of Queensland, where she worked one semester. In 2018, she got the prestigious Visiting Scholarship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal (CCA). As a scholar, Malfona authored more than 100 publications, among which a number of essays and monographs on matters related to the history, theory and criticism of architecture, focusing on the relationship between architectural form and urban space. In particular, she critically reconsidered the legacy of some masters of Italian architecture, from Giambattista Piranesi, to Marcello Piacentini, Saverio Muratori, Aldo Rossi, and Manfredo Tafuri. Together with Franco Purini, she edited the book “Antonio Sant’Elia. Il Manifesto dell’Architettura Futurista”, which contains contributions by Jean-Louis Cohen, Joseph Rykwert and Kenneth Frampton, among others (Gangemi, 2015). In her early works, she focused on the architecture of the city, as in her doctoral dissertation, where she investigated theories and practices of urban design during the 60s and 70s (Il tracciato urbano, Libria 2012). With intent to make operative her theoretical speculation, she started working on the city of Rome, at the center of her writing, exhibitions, and workshops, from her book Tra Roma e il mare (Libria, 2014) to her paper “Sleeping Beauty. Aesthetics of Ruins, Corruption and Rome” (SAHANZ, Canberra 2017), and her contribution to the exhibition “Roma 20-25” (MAXXI Museum, Roma, 2015). Over time, she analyzed the form of the city as a critical and political device for social and architectural innovation, and recently she is working on the impact of the digital revolution on architectural and urban design, theory, and critique, the core of her forthcoming book Silicon Valley (2019). Her writings have been published through Il Poligrafo, Gangemi, Quodlibet, and in Ananke, Ardeth, The Avery Review, and Rassegna di Architettura e Urbanistica, among others.
