Franca Trubiano

Franca Trubiano is Graduate Group Chair of the PhD Program in Architecture, Associate Professor, and a Registered Architect with l'Order des Architects du Québec. She is also co-director of Penn's Mellon funded, Humanities + Urban + Design Initiative.

Trubiano is author of  Building Theories, Architecture as the Art of Building (Routledge 2023), a work which sets the foundations for a critical return to the art of making in architecture by valorizing the untapped potential of 'thinking through building'. Her forthcoming co-edited book BIO/MATTER/TECHNO/SYNTHETICS: Design for the More Than Human (ACTAR 2023) gathers design research and scholarship from twenty women whose future-ready visions for design seek to transform the discipline's definition and destiny. Trubiano's co-edited Women [Re]Build; Stories, Polemics, Futures (ORO - ar+d, 2019) features the words and works of leading women thinkers, activists, designers, and builders who have dared to ask, "Where are the Women?" and her edited book Design and Construction of High-Performance Homes: Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies and Integrated Practice (Routledge Press 2012), was translated into Korean and awarded the 2015 Sejong Outstanding Scholarly Book Award, from the Korea Publication Industry Promotion Agency.

At Penn, Trubiano conducts funded research on 'Architectural Ethics and Forced Labor in the Building Industry,' as well as on 'Fossil Fuels, the Building Industry, and Human Health.' Trubiano was Principal Investigator and inaugural member of the Consortium for Building Energy Innovation (CBEI), a DOE funded project which resulted in the creation of industry ready Advanced Energy Integrated Design Roadmaps of use by all members of the AEC in pursuit of advanced energy retrofits. Trubiano has also conducted funded research on Building Information Modeling (BIM), for improving facility management processes and for the translation of BIM authoring models into custom masonry protocols.

Trubiano was President of the Building Technology Educators Society (BTES), Founding member of the Editorial Board of the journal TAD (Technology, Architecture and Design), and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Architectural Education (2014-2016). She is, at present, on the Editorial Board of CONTEXT, the AIA Philadelphia Journal.

In 2014, she was awarded the Weitzman School, G. Holmes Perkins Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2003-2004, she was the first McMahan Visiting Associate Professor at Clemson University and, from 2004 to 2009, she was Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she was awarded the 2008 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activity Award, and the 2007 Outstanding Teacher Award from the College of Architecture. Trubiano completed her Ph.D. in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005.