Dr. Giulia Celentano

Dr. Giulia Celentano is a  Senior Scientific Assistant at the Chair of Sustainable Construction, where she focuses on sustainable strategies for the built environment in  humanitarian projects and contexts of scarce resources in the Global South, as informal settlements, post-disaster and post-conflict settlements.

She is the focal point in the Chair for research and applied projects in the Humanitarian and Development sector, based on ongoing and completed collaborations with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC),  and the United Nations (UN-HABITAT, UNHCR), including design-assisted tool development, sustainability assessments and advisory in policy-making. 

Besides the research projects (currently involving the ICRC and the Shelter Cluster via UNHCR) Dr. Celentano is a lecturer at the Chair CAS in Regenerative Material as well as in the courses offered at D-BAUG and D-ARCH Master level, and is the coordinator of the MOOC in Regenerative Materials (under development, scheduled for 2023).

She developed her Ph.D. at the Chair of Sustainable Construction, exploring "The regenerative development potential of the construction sector in the informal city: the cases of Bangkok, Nairobi and Cape Town", based on field-based data collection and a trans-disciplinary socio-technical approach.  

She holds a Bachelor in Architecture and Construction from Politecnico di Milano (2009) and a MSc of Architecture from the same University, attending one year in Universidade Lusiada de Lisboa, and a Master level short course in Shelter and Settlements in Emergencies (Natural Disaster) from the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) in collaboration with the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP) at Oxford Brookes University.  

Prior to joining the Chair, Dr. Celentano got hands-on training on earth based construction (in Italy and in Portugal) and started collaborating with diverse NGOs and groups on field-based architectural projects and constructions in Kenya (Mathare slum, Nairobi), Guatemala (Cerro la Granadilla) and Egypt (Al Qarafa slum, Il Cairo).
Giulia then briefly joined ETH D-ARCH for a technical research on construction options for aninformal settlement upgrading project in Cape Town (South Africa), and then to coordinate a rammed earth construction site in Barcelona (Spain).