Franca Trubiano

Biography

Ph.D (University of Pennsylvania)
M.Arch + B.Arch (McGill University)
Ordres des Architectes du Quebec, OAQ
Int. Assoc. AIA
Principal Investigator, Energy Efficient Buildings HUB (EEBHUB), DOE

Franca Trubiano is a registered architect, researcher and educator. Her research areas include construction technology, materials, tectonic theories, integrated design, architectural ecologies, and high performance buildings.

She is editor and co-author of the recently published Design and Construction of High Performance Homes: Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies and Integrated Practice (Routledge Press), which features architectural innovations in building skin technologies, energy-free architectural design principles, advances in building-integrated photovoltaics, essential engineering principles, controls and approaches to simulation for achieving net zero, and the advantages of integrated design in residential construction. It also discusses innovative case studies of homes which have incorporated a series of low-energy design solutions.

Franca is also a Research Associate and inaugural member of the Energy Efficient Buildings HUB, a US Energy Innovation Hub located the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Her funded research is focused on the use of Integrated Design Practices for the Energy Efficient Retrofit of buildings in a mid-Atlantic region.

At the University of Pennsylvania, she teaches high performance building design studios in the graduate and post-professional Masters of Environmental Building Design Program, as well as Construction Technology seminars. She has also introduced Building Information Modeling in the Construction Technology sequence by authoring a two-volume BIM Handbook for use by students.

Previously, in 2003-2004, Franca was the first McMahan Visiting Associate Professor at Clemson University and, from 2004-2009, Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. While at Georgia Tech, she was co-recipient of a DOE/NREL Solar Decathlon Grant to design, build and operate a zero-energy house on the Mall in Washington in October 2007. As lead architecture faculty and construction project manager, she collaborated with hundreds of students, faculty and industry partners in garnering 6th position overall, 4th place in the Architecture Competition, and 3rd place in Drawings and Specifications. The fully integrated design build project also won the BP Green Award for its inventive use of new materials and technologies. http://solar.gatech.edu/home.php

In 2009, student work from her studio ECO-SKINS: The Design and Construction of Low Energy High Performance Building Envelopes was awarded a COTE - Committee on the Environment (AIA) Award. And in 2005, her paper 'Material Matters: Seeking Collaborations between the building industry and innovative architectural practices The Cases of Thomas Herzog and Ove Arup' was awarded the ARCC - Architectural Research Center Consortium, Best Conference Paper Award.

Her writings will be published in forthcoming books Architecture and Energy (eds. Braham and Willis, Routledge Press, 2013) and Architecture and Uncertainty (ed. Benjamin Flowers, Ashgate Press, 2013). Her work has been published in DETAIL, Journal of Architectural Education, SCAPES, Chora, as well as the Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Architecture.

She has been the recipient of a number of research grants, including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant (Canada) and a Fonds aux Chercheurs et Aide â la Recherche (Quebec),as well as the co-recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant.