(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Professor Luiz Amorim holds a Bachelor Degree in Architecture and Urbanism (1982, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil) and a PhD (1999, University College London).  While holding a private office between 1983 and 1990, he has been engaged in various professional activities, but he has dedicated most of his time to teaching and researching, first at the Universidade Federal de Alagoas and later at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, where he remains to the present. His main field of research is urban and architectural morphology, with a particular interest in Space Syntax, but he has also published papers and books on modern and contemporary Brazilian architecture and heritage conservation. He was a member of the Specialists Committee of Education of Architecture and Urbanism, of the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Sports between 1993 and 1994, and a member of various scientific committees in Brazil and abroad.

Natália Piason: Architect and Urbanist and Master’s student in conservation of modern historical heritage at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). Since 2019, she has been developing her research interweaving two fields of knowledge: that of the conservation of modern historical heritage and space syntax, thus focusing on the conservation of the spatial configuration of architectural heritage buildings, more specifically in their integrity and authenticity. She is particularly interested in studying university buildings. I have studied a diverse range of buildings, cities, places and spaces, from the history of Italian Renaissance cities to 20th century cities shaped by industrial production, and from the architecture of parliament buildings, homes, parks, museums, libraries, universities and shopping centres to the ways in which architecture is represented in cinema and literature. My research is transdisciplinary spanning the fields of architectural history and theory, spatial morphology, social sciences and cultural studies. My book Architecture and Narrative (Routledge 2009) provides a unique account of architecture as a semi-autonomous object and as a spatial-social field of embodied vision as we encounter it in our everyday life (translated in Korean). My most recent authored book, The Venice Variations (UCL Press 2018, open access) draws an original approach to the subject of architectural authorship by examining the intersection between authored architectural works and cities as the products of collective authorship. My edited book, The Production Sites of Architecture, explores how architecture produces new knowledge by examining buildings, texts and additional media involved in their production. I am the recipient of Brazilian and Portuguese research funding, Leverhulme Trust; NSF (USA); The University of Michigan, UCL, the Onassis Foundation; UCL Grand Challenges; and industry. I have given more than 50 invited international lectures and keynotes in Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, Chile, Greece, Italy, Japan, the UK and USA. I have served as reviewer of research applications in the LAHP netowrk UK; the Domain of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and the Research Council and IOF Council of KU Leuven.