About

Franca Trubiano is Associate Professor of Architecture, Chair of the Graduate Group of Architecture, and a Registered Architect with l'Ordre des Architects du Québec. She is also co-director of Penn's Mellon funded, Humanities + Urban + Design Initiative. Trubiano is the author of Building Theories, Architecture as the Art of Building (Routledge 2023), which sets the foundations for a critical return to the arts of making in architecture by valorizing the untapped potential of 'thinking through building'. Her forthcoming co-edited book BIO/MATTER/TECHNO/SYNTHETICS: Design for the More Than Human (ACTAR 2023) gathers design research and scholarship from twenty women whose future-ready visions for design seek to transform the discipline's definition and destiny. She has also co-edited Women [Re]Build; Stories, Polemics, Futures (ORO - ar+d, 2019) and edited Design and Construction of High-Performance Homes: Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies and Integrated Practice (Routledge Press 2012), which was translated into Korean and awarded the 2015 Sejong Outstanding Scholarly Book Award. At Penn, Trubiano conducts funded research on 'Architectural Ethics and Forced Labor in the Building Industry' and on 'Fossil Fuels, the Building Industry, and Human Health.' She was Principal Investigator and inaugural member of the DOE-funded Consortium for Building Energy Innovation (CBEI), which resulted in the creation of industry-ready Advanced Energy Integrated Design Roadmaps. Her research also includes work on Building Information Modeling (BIM) for facility management and masonry protocols. Trubiano has held leadership roles such as President of the Building Technology Educators Society (BTES), and has served on editorial boards including the Journal of Architectural Education and CONTEXT, the AIA Philadelphia Journal. She received the G. Holmes Perkins Award for Distinguished Teaching at the Weitzman School in 2014. Her academic career includes positions at Clemson University and Georgia Institute of Technology, where she received awards for interdisciplinary activity and teaching. She completed her Ph.D. in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Art
• Epistemology
• Architectural engineering
• Civil engineering
• Aesthetics
• Engineering
• History

Selected publications

• Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective

  Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians · 2026-05-19

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Covering ground: Identifying the risk of forced labor in five of the most specified landscape architecture materials in the US

  2025-06-30

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Forced labor exists in our building material supply chain. Children are playing games and making friends surrounded by plastics and polymers once handled by children who themselves, labored illegally in their production. This paper discusses research methods and initial findings of a funded research project sponsored by the LAF in the United States that assesses the extent of the problem in our building material supply chains. The material products investigated drain water, level the grade, and cushion the fall of athletes. Five engineered materials—synthetic turf, rubber safety surface, geotextile filter fabric, recycled plastic lumber, and permeable pavers—are the focus of this study. Available market tools, professional protocols, business centered data resources, as well as supply chain audit tools are discussed for helping us identify strategies of use to researchers, educators, and professionals who seek to locate the evidence of forced labor in the production of said building materials.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Building material supply chains and forced labor: The case of fossil fuel-based polymers

  2025-06-30 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Materials in the building industry contribute to the presence of forced labor in the supply chains of construction. This paper speaks to the evidence of a concatenated set of risks associated with the production, use, and disposal of fossil-fuel derived polymers, including health risks due to toxicity, exposure to forced labor, and human rights abuses. It discusses how the building industry participates in ‘violence capitalism’ while highlighting the case of one petrochemical company, among many, whose polymer based raw materials and finished products are ubiquitous across the entire life cycle of building. It also discusses more broadly the extent of such violations in the construction industry and concludes with a reminder that violence only begets more violence. Should we not begin to address the way in which individuals are placed at risk in the production of our building materials, as researchers, educators, and professionals we will continue to perpetuate harm to fellow humans in the built environment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Precarity, the future of architectural research in a time of much uncertainty

  Enquiry The ARCC Journal for Architectural Research · 2023-11-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Editoral framing of the special issue of ENQ on PRECARITY: PhD conference on architectural research at the limits of technology, project-making, and history/theory held on APRIL 22-23, 2022 and organized and sponsored by the PhD Program in Architecture at UPENN, Weitzman School of Design

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Etiske overvejelser:Fokusér på materialernes produktionsforhold

  Architecture, Design and Conservation (Aarhus School of Architecture, Design School Kolding, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation (KADK)) · 2023-10-16

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• The Composite Mind Re-Builds Theory

  2022-10-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Design and Construction: Walter Gropius and Ove Arup

  2022-10-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Lost in Translation

  2022-10-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• From Aesthetics to Ethics, and Back

  Routledge eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

• Building Theories

  2022-10-12

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Building Theories speaks to the value of words in architecture. It addresses the author’s fascination with the voices of architects, engineers, builders, and craftspeople whose ideas about building have been captured in text. It discusses the content of treatises, essays, articles, and letters by those who have been, throughout history, committed to the art of building. In this, Building Theories argues for the return of a practice of architectural theory that is set amongst building, buildings, and builders. This journey of close reading reinterprets the words of Vitruvius, Alberti, de L’Orme, Le Camus de Mézières, Boullée, Laugier, Rondelet, Semper, Viollet-le-Duc, Hübsch, Bötticher, Berlage, Muthesius, Wagner, Behrendt, Gropius, and Arup. With chapters dedicated to texts from antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century, and with a critical eye on architectural theory popularized in the Anglo-Saxon world post-1968, readers are introduced to a wider, more inclusive definition of architectural ideas. Building Theories considers how contemporary scholarship has steered away from the topic of building in its reluctance to admit that both design and construction are central to its concerns. In response, it argues for a realignment of architecture with the concept of techné, with a dual commitment to fabrica e ratio, with a productive return to l’art de bien bastir, with the accurate translation of the term Baukunst, and with an appeal to the architect’s ‘composite mind.’ Students, practitioners, and educators will identify in Building Theories ways of thinking that strive for the integration of design with construction; reject the supposed primacy of the former over the latter; recognize how aesthetics are an insufficient scaffold for subtending the subject of architectural ethics; and accept, without reservation, that material transformations have always been at the origins of built form.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kristen Albee

  California University of Pennsylvania

  3 shared

• Meghan Brennan

  University of Florida

  2 shared

• Jonathan Dessi-Olive

  1 shared

• Aylin Ozkan

  Rowan Williams Davies & Irwin (Canada)

  1 shared

• C. Jason Mabry

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  1 shared

• Russell Gentry

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  1 shared

• Yun Kyu Yi

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  1 shared

• Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2014 G. Holmes Perkins Award for Distinguished Teaching