Elisa Dainese

University of Pennsylvania

Architectural culture in translation: postwar Italian cities and African villages

2016-2017: Fall

Dr. Elisa Dainese is an architect and a historian, and she is currently a lecturer and Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research is developed in connection with the University of Pennsylvania (History of Art Department), Harvard University (Department of African and African American Studies), and the IUAV University of Venice (Faculty of Architecture). The project explores the key role that sub-Saharan Africa played in the development of modern architecture in Europe and America from the 1940s to the 1970s.

In 2012, Dr. Dainese earned her PhD in Architectural Design at the IUAV University of Venice (Italy), with a dissertation focused on post-war architecture, Aldo van Eyck, and the fascination for Dogon art and architecture of Mali (Africa). Dr. Dainese is the author of articles and essays published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (“Histories of Exchange: Indigenous South Africa in the South African Architectural Record and the Architectural Review”, Dec 2015), Le Corbusier, 50 years later (2015), New Urban Configurations (2014), Nuove qualità del vivere in periferia (2013), Landscape and Imagination (2013), and Catalogo della Mostra Internazionale Triennale d’Architettura Milano (2012).

Dr. Dainese is a colloquium member of the Humanities+Urbanism+Design initiative, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative initiative, supported by the Mellon Foundation at MIT. Dr. Dainese served as co-curator of both the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2010), IUAV AFRICA - Rwanda Pavilion, and the Milan Triennale of Architecture (2013) where she focused on World Architecture.

Web page: www.elisadainese.com