Lecture Series: Piergianna Mazzocca | Good, Well, and Better
Good, Well, and Better:
The relationship between architecture and health can be observed everywhere—evidence of architecture’s ever-going processes of medicalization. This lecture unpacks the ways in which concepts of health are engrained in the ways in which architectural knowledge is produced and reproduced, practiced and theorized, and what new pedagogies for architectural education can emerge when the concepts, norms, and practices that have been rendered invisible by the assumption that health is a monolithic universal good are put into question. As the result of her two-year-long fellowship as the Emerging Scholar in Design at UT Austin School of Architecture, Piergianna Mazzocca will navigate the ways in which these questions have shaped and framed her pedagogical project and research.
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Piergianna Mazzocca is an architect, researcher, and educator. Her research interest expands on the medicalization of architecture through the study of both domestic and medical typologies and the formation of architectural knowledge when framed through its relationship with medical sciences and biopolitics. She obtained her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of the Andes in Merida, Venezuela, and a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, at the Delft University of Technology. She was the 2017-2019 Wortham Fellow at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and currently is the Emerging Scholar in Design at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2019 Piergianna won, in collaboration with David Costanza, the Ragdale Ring Competition for their entry “Shared Beds,” a project that challenged the role of the individual vis-à-vis the collective by reconsidering the seemingly inanimate quality of everyday objects such as beds.
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The UTSOA Spring 2021 Lecture Series will be presented digitally through Zoom and will be live-streamed on the Texas Architecture YouTube channel. All lectures will take place at 12:30 PM unless noted otherwise.