Dr Anna GASCO

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Senior Researcher & Project Coordinator, The Grand Projet

Anna Gasco is a Senior Researcher and Project Coordinator at the FCL, where she currently leads “the Grand Projet - Towards Adaptable and Liveable Urban Megaprojects”. Chartered Part III architect in the UK and urban designer, she previously worked for renowned practices for over seven years, including KCAP and SOM, where she helped shaping visionary projects at multiple scales such as the Legacy Masterplan of the London Olympics, a strategic regional planning study in Paris and various redevelopment sites in central London, Brussels, Dublin as well as Saint Petersburg.  

A native Italian born in Congo, her international career is juxtaposed with research that began in 2011, when she joined FCL. In this multidisciplinary research platform, she completed her dissertation on the urbanising effects of airports in transnational contexts and at territorial scales. Through teaching design research studios at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (ETH Zurich), the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), she also investigated urban socio-spatial fragmentation, public housing and densification. After acting as post-doctoral researcher, she was appointed Project Coordinator of the Grand Projet, a research on large-scale, mixed-use, master-planned urban projects in contemporary European and Asian cities. In addition she acts as architect and urban design consultant for both private and public clients in Singapore and Europe.

Anna holds a PhD degree in Architecture and Urbanism from ETH Zurich, a Master degree in Urban Design from the Bartlett UCL London (dist.) and a Diploma in Architecture from St Luc Brussels (summa cum laude). Her research has been published with Routledge, the Singapore Architect and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Her work has been exhibited at the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Hong Kong/Shenzhen, the Boston Society of Architects, Aedes Berlin, and the Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority.  

Research  

Anna’s research interests are currently twofold. On the one hand, she investigates large-scale, mixed-use, master-planned urban projects, or Grand Projet, aiming to identify their mechanisms of development, their characteristics and designs, their transformation over time and the influence that they have on the urban context of contemporary European and Asian cities. Specifically she focuses on Grand Projet in the city of London from 1980s to present —such as King’s Cross Central, Paddington, Battersea Nine Elms, Canary Wharf and Broadgate—, as well as Paris La Defense. On the other hand, through design-consultancy work for private and public clients, she builds on the research developed during her PhD dissertation on the urban interactions between airports and city-regions, particularly that of Singapore’s Changi Airport and the larger transnational context of the Singapore-Johor-Riau (SIJORI) cross-border region.

Awards

  • Golden Brick Award - Teaching Award 2013, FCL Design Research Studio, Rochor+: Microscale urbanity - shaping an alternative urban vision. Kees Christiaanse, Ying Zhou, Edda Ostertag, Anna Gasco
  • University IUAV of Venice, Erasmus Scholarship, 2001
  • International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) Venice, Scholarship, 2001

Exhibitions & Conferences

Education

PHD Architecture and Urbanism (ETH Zurich)
MSc [dist.] Urban Design (The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL London)
Dipl. [hon.] Architecture (Institut Supérieur d'Architecture St Luc Brussels)

Affiliation

Architects Registration Board of the UK (Part III)

 
 
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11.07.2017
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