Elena Longhin works between architecture, urbanism and political ecology.
She holds a MArch and PhD in architecture from IUAV and graduated from the Landscape Urbanism Programme of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She is a registered architect in Italy and the UK and has collaborated with several practices, including Secchi-Viganò and OMA, in Europe and Argentina. She works and develops projects at the intersection of architecture, landscape and urbanism in diverse contexts, exploring the idea of a spatial practice that recognises the inherently conflicting dynamics that drive human occupation, whether urban or remote. Her work has been exhibited internationally as part of the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale, as well as in the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Chile, Japan, Hong Kong and the United States, among others, and has been published in both print and digital media. Elena received commendations from the Manuel de Solà–Morales Award and from the Italian Ferraro Prize for her doctoral research in 2023.
Prior to joining the Urban Design section of TUDelft, the Delta Urbanism group and the Redesigning Deltas research programme, Elena was a Postdoc Research Fellow and tutor at the IUAV University of Venice and taught in both the AA’s undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, as well as in various international Visiting Schools worldwide. Since 2016, she has been Programme Head of the AA Visiting School Terrain Lab, a research platform investigating the spatial palimpsests of the Anthropocene. She is also currently an executive member of the Habitat Research Centre at EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland, where she focuses on the Landscape Habitat research field and manages the Campus in Transition project.
Currently, her work explores the systemic understanding of land (onshore and offshore rare earth mining dynamics), scarcity, extremes and complexity, focusing on materiality, fluidity and resources to draw out latent relationships across scales, addressing intensifying social injustice and ecological crisis.