Anna Gasco has been appointed head of the Master's programme in Urbanism by the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. Effective 1 September, she will succeed Markus Appenzeller, who will hand over the position after six years. The Academy of Architecture is very pleased with her appointment. Anna Gasco will deliver her inaugural lecture at the Academy on October 5th.
Anna was trained as an architect in Brussels and Venice. She received her Master’s degree in Urban Design at The Bartlett UCL London and her PhD from the ETH-Zurich. She is a registered architect and urban designer with over 20 years of experience in practice, research, and teaching.
Committed to cultivating synergies between professional and academic worlds, she founded her Studio of Urban Planning and Living Architecture in Singapore in 2018, which established in Amsterdam in 2022. Supported by the spinoff program of the multidisciplinary ETH-Future Cities Laboratory (FCL), Studio UPLA is a practice dedicated to design, research, and education. Anna’s teaching experience include a visiting faculty membership as Design Critic at Harvard GSD, an Adjunct Assistant Professorship at the National University of Singapore, and teaching at the ETH-Zurich. She has also lectured at The Bartlett UCL and for Singapore governmental agencies.
In her position as Associate at KCAP Architects&Planners, she currently manages projects at multiple scales for private and public clients internationally. She has experience in project delivery, the know-how of working in multidisciplinary teams and taking a holistic approach to design. From 2011 to 2019, she was a senior researcher and project coordinator at FCL. She is one of the lead authors of the monograph ‘The Grand Projet’ (nai010, 2019), ‘The SIJORI Cross-Border Region’ (ISEAS, 2016), and the author of the forthcoming ‘The Airport, an Urban Territory’ (NUS Press, 2024). Her work has been exhibited at the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Hong Kong/Shenzhen, the Boston Society of Architects, Aedes Berlin and the Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA).
Anna comments on her appointment: "These are exciting times for the urban design profession and education, where we must find new ways of working together to bridge ecologies of cities and ecologies of nature. My vision of urbanism is grounded on a holistic understanding of space, a close connection between the built environment and its living systems (soil, water, climate, etc.), and how these interrelate to shape a specific place. Because we can no longer offer fragmented answers, urbanism has a major role to play as a projective discipline: guiding all actors towards a common vision. I look forward to continuing to engage urban design education with practice and research-based work, seeking interdisciplinary cooperation to develop a pedagogical program that reflects the challenges of our urbanised world at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam."