Dr. Federica Goffi

Professor and Co-Chair PhD & MAS programs

• federica.goffi@carleton.ca

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Dr. Federica Goffi is Professor of architecture and co-chair of the PhD and MAS programs (with Dr. Stephen Fai) at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism.

Goffi was Interim Director of the ASAU from July 2021-December 2022. From 2013-2017 she was Associate Director of Graduate Studies and from 2011-2013 she was Associate Director of Professional Graduate Studies.

Goffi’s research concerns the renewal of buildings, whether they be heritage or not, questioning the relationship between architecture and time. Starting from the idea that a building is a sustainable work-in-progress and not the result of a single event of design, her work investigates built conservation as a form of invention and imagination. Her book, Time Matter[s]: Invention and Re-imagination in Built Conservation: The Unfinished Drawing and Building of St. Peter’s in the Vatican was published by Ashgate in 2013.

She is the editor of The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models: From Translating to Archiving, Collecting and Displaying (May 2022). Goffi pre-launched the book at the international lecture series Mantovarchitettura, organized by the UNESCO Chair in Architectural Preservation and Planning in World Heritage Cities.

She is guest editor of a special issue of the Routledge journal Architecture and Culture, titled And Yet It Moves: Ethics, Power and Politics in the Stories of Collecting, Archiving and Displaying of Architectural Drawings and Models (September 2021).

She is the Chair of the Carleton Research | Practice of Teaching | Collaborative (C R | P T | C, founded in 2019). The collaborative pursues research in the humanities with a diverse research agenda. Agora II: (Un)Common Precedents took place on September 22-24, 2023. A co-edited book by Dr. Federica Goffi and PhD candidates Isabel Potworowski and Kristin Washco based on the symposium is under contract with Routledge Architecture. 

In 2024, she published the co-edited book Architectures of Hiding: Crafting Concealment | Omission | Deception | Erasure | Silence together with Rana Abughannam, Émélie Desrochers- Turgeon, Pallavi Swaranjali. The book was developed from Agora I, an International Symposium held at ASAU in September 2021 by the book editors.

She edited a book titled, InterVIEWS: Insight and Introspection in Doctoral Research in Architecture (Routledge 2020).

Goffi edited Marco Frascari’s Dream House: A Theory of Imagination (Routledge 2017) and co-edited Ceilings and Dreams: The Architecture of Levity (2020). She has also published book chapters (Routledge, Intellect Press, Leuven Press) and journal articles on the threefold nature of time-weather-tempo (OBL/QUE, AD, INTAR, ARQ, Interstices, InForm, Scroope).

Goffi is interested in the relationship between psychosomatic health and architecture and has published articles originating from the observation of infraordinary events in the everyday life of healthcare facilities, to challenge the implementation of ordinary details, and respond to overlooked design issues fostering psychosomatic health in the built environment. She believes that it will be increasingly important for architects to design adaptable architectural details whose impact can be felt at the scale of cities.

Her recent publications include:

“FACTUM 1:1,” in T-Squared. Theories & Tactics in Architecture and Design, edited by Samantha Krukowski, with an introduction by David Leatherbarrow. Intellect Press (January 2022).

“Chromesthesia and the Multiverse of Listening in Music and Architecture: Luigi Nono in Collaboration with Renzo Piano,” in The Sound of Architecture: Acoustic Atmospheres in Place. Edited by Angeliki Sioli and Elisavet Kiourtsoglou. Elsevier (May 2022).

“Sited-Memory: A Peripatetic Storytelling at the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona.” JOELHO 13: Memory, Memorabilia and the Making. Edited by Armando Rabaça, Bruno Gil (March 2022).