Liminal Architecture
Valentina Rodani is an architect and researcher engaged in critical design thinking, education and design practice. Graduated in Architecture with honours at the University of Trieste (2017) and earned her Ph.D. Doctor Europaeus in Architectural and Urban Design with honours at the Universities of Trieste and Udine (2022), which included a visiting Ph.D. period at the University of Ljubljana (2021). Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Politecnico di Milano’s Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, collaborating in the PRIN research project Italian Borderscapes After 2020. Since 2017, she has contributed to architectural design education as a teaching assistant and invited critic at the Universities of Trieste, Ljubljana, and Politecnico di Milano. She also works as a practitioner, developing multimedia and site-specific artefacts as medium for connecting research-driven production and design practice, bridging the academic across the cultural and creative sectors (In\Visible Cities; Museo Ugo Carà; Stazione Rogers).
Her research centers on critical design thinking, utilizing design research methodologies to investigate interdisciplinary frameworks. She explores the liminality of borders, exile, and migration at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and anthropology. Her research trajectory began by delving into the spatiality of borders, leading to her doctoral work Liminal Architecture. Enduring Experimentation on the Threshold of the Moving Border which questioned how design projects and practices shaped thresholds of spatial belonging and temporal becoming in the Italo-Slovenian borderscape. Her individual and collective work was presented at seminars and international conferences (CA2RE; Architects in Exile; UNISCAPE; BRIT), exhibited (Banned; Vivere negli aeroporti; Apocalipsis cum figuris; OpenAIR), published and awarded (Ugo Carà Master thesis award 2017; PhD Gubbio Prize by ANCSA 2024).
Liminal Architecture is a research project questioning the role of architects and spatial practitioners in challenging the ongoing multiplication and securitization of borders, globally planned but locally experienced in Europe and beyond. While the intersection between architecture and borders might sound provocative – quoting Rem Koolhaas’ The Berlin Wall as Architecture (1995) – architectural and design practices can play a critical role in deconstructing spatial ordering and, at the same time, experimenting with the design of liminal thresholds for spatial belonging and temporal becoming.
This project delves into a peculiar, yet pervasive, phenomenon: how architecture engages with, is shaped by, and in turn, reshapes the spatiality of borders. Architectural and design practices offer vital critiques of movement control regimes, revealing their socio-spatial effects on transient bodies, cross-border communities, and transboundary ecologies. Several design approaches critically deconstruct bordering processes, investigating spatial perception, representation, and imagination as daily creative acts of resistance and experimentation with transformative alternatives. This research identifies and analyzes cases where architects and spatial practitioners – often through bottom-up, site-specific interventions – challenge spatial ordering. These range from ephemeral installations and community-led initiatives that foster cross-border interaction to more enduring experiments that persistently reshape the experience of the border. Through the LINA Community, Liminal Architecture aims to enhance its public outreach and research potential, by developing a book, fieldwork and site-specific spatial practices. These mediums will collectively explore design's critical potential for undoing borders by designing thresholds of spatial belonging and temporal becoming.