Biography

Guido Robazza is an architect passionate about cities. He is Senior Lecturer at the Portsmouth School of Architecture, where he coordinates the Project Office, a practice-based research and educational environment that promotes urban and architectural collective practices of civic engagement. Guido teaches urban planning, architectural design, and architectural representation. He recently set up the post-graduate Master unit Open Cities Lab: Design for emergent urban territories. Guido is an active researcher. He recently completed his practice-based doctoral thesis exploring Temporary Urban Practices in the contemporary city, and is currently a co-investigator in the Interreg project ‘Plasticity: Resourcing Plastics from the City’, and in the Global Challenges Research Project ‘Building Resilient Coastal Communities’.

Prior to his current position, Guido worked as researcher at LSE Cities - Urban Age, where he contributed to a range of research projects on urbanization processes and their socio-economic implications. Among other projects, he coordinated the ‘Cities and Energy’ research as well as lead the data section of the publication ‘Living in the Endless City’.

Guido has organised international conferences, and participated as guest speaker in several ones, publishing on urban subjects including mobility, environmental sustainability and temporary urbanism. He was awarded prizes in international competitions of architecture, urban design, and info-graphic data-visualization. He has been visiting lecturer at the New York University (NYU), Istituto di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV), Ca Foscari Venezia, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) and Beijing Jiaotong University (BJU).

As a practicing architect, Guido co-founded and directed NoWall Architecture, a practice based in London and Bogotá, designing projects for both the private and public sectors, including urban regeneration projects, public spaces, parks and mixed-use buildings. He has extensive international experience: he participated as design consultant to the RiverCity Gothenburg Vision (Sweden), acted as advisor for the planning department of Bogota’ DC (Colombia), supervised the construction of a slum upgrading project in Asuncion (Paraguay), and cooperated with an ONG in a post-earthquake capacity building project in Kathmandu (Nepal).

His work was exhibited at the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale ‘Cities, Architecture, Society’ (2006) and he has recently curated the project ‘DataFrames: A journey Through Global Data’ exhibited in the Italian Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale ‘How Will We Live Together’ (2021).

Guido holds a specialization in housing from the Institute of Cooperation in Habitat (Madrid – 2008), studied at the Polytechnic School of Architecture of Madrid and at the University of Architecture of Venice, where he was awarded his Master degree in 2004.