Specialist Conservation Series: Analysing the Palladian Villa and its use as a climate hub

11th June 2024, 1pm – 2pm

Join us for a CPD session on Analysing the Palladian Villa and its use as a climate hub with Michela Pace & Alan Chandler, as part of a series of four ‘Conservation Suite’ webinars which explore a wide range of conservation issues spanning from the theoretical to the technical.

In this module Michela and Alan will then be following up with a really exciting presentation of The Palladian Villa and its use as a climate hub, supporting multiple municipalities to create social and environmental resilience.

The presentation proposes to consider ecological, economic and social agendas as equal and integral to heritage conservation demonstrated by CLIMHUB, an ongoing project in Bassano del Grappa, in north-eastern Italy, where a 16th century Palladian villa is operated by several strongly socially oriented organisations that have turned the spaces of the villa into a ‘common good’. The project considers climate adaptation strategies for the villa’s garden, addressing social and territorial fragilities together, in the conviction that one cannot be conceived without the other, acknowledging but not led by normative, technically biassed approaches to sustainability. Through the ClimHub experience, we present a redefinition of heritage value, based not only on the historical qualities of the buildings but also on the possibility of them becoming spaces of collective interest and integrated resilience.

Learning outcomes

• Observe the application of integrated social and environmental sustainability approaches
• Understand the link between the territorial and relational transformation dimensions
• Learn how to operationally decline the project objectives: territorial transformation techniques with a measurable impact, community education through mass cultural events and dissemination of good practices to the public administration
• Activate a reflection that moves between scales, observing the domestic threshold and at the same time the neighbourhood, the city, the region.

These CPD modules have been curated to provide learning opportunities for all architects, whether they are newcomers or experienced, in the field of heritage.

Speakers

Michela Pace
Architect and PhD in urban planning and design at Iuav University, Venice, Michela was a researcher at the University of East London (2011-2015) and Tongji University, Shanghai (2017). Since 2008 she has been researching and teaching as part of the Iuav CityLab Cluster. The research group deals with the processes of transformation and transition of the territory and the contemporary city.
Her research benefits from experiences in different countries (Italy, UK, China, Brazil) and across different themes. She studies the role of heritage within urban regeneration and territorial preservation projects, focusing on the dynamics of the real estate market and its spatial outcomes, examining the problems of financialization, privatisation and gentrification posed by the rapid growth of global cities and the neoliberal economic model, observing the close relationship between housing representation and spatial production.

Alan Chandler
Co-Director of the Sustainability Research Institute (University of East London) and a Director of conservation-based practice Arts Lettres Techniques.
The politics of built heritage underpins the supervision of many doctoral students and has been published by Routledge – ‘The Production of Heritage’ with Michela Pace. His professional career as a Specialist Conservation Architect and Co-Chair of the RIBA Conservation Steering Group fully informs both teaching and research, with practice projects on National monuments such as the Grade 1 listed St Pancras Church and the Palacio Pereira in Santiago de Chile with Cecilia Puga.
Alan Chandler has previously taught at the Architectural Association, Goldsmith’s College of Art, Cambridge University and Edinburgh University