Ilaria Iacconi Iambrenghi (1994) works at the intersection of architecture, communication, and urban sociological studies, exploring the complex relationships between space and society.
Her approach is tessellated, a methodological stance that rejects both disciplinary separation and disciplinary fusion. Different fields operate as contiguous, non-hierarchical units, whose encounter generates zones of intersection through which the complexities and discontinuities of the urban condition become legible.
Rather than focusing exclusively on the aesthetic or technical aspects of spatial design, her work examines how built environments embody cultural, political, and ecological narratives. She approaches space as an active agent, capable of organising behaviours, distributing exposure and protection, and inscribing inequalities, desires, and forms of belonging into its material and symbolic structures.
In an era of accelerated crisis, marked by climate collapse, democratic erosion, and widening social inequalities, her research calls for cities to be reimagined as dynamic and relational ecosystems. It is grounded in the conviction that space is never neutral. It encodes power, memory, and possibility.
As a theorist of intersectional urbanism and crip space, she develops conceptual frameworks to read urban environments through the lenses of justice, care, and embodiment, making visible the interconnections between bodies, vulnerabilities, and ecologies within spatial systems of privilege and exclusion.
In 2024, she founded cris&s – centre for research on intersectional spaces and societies, a research platform dedicated to the study of space as a structuring condition of permanent crisis. Through cris&s, she works across research, writing, and curatorial practices, collaborating with architects, urbanists, researchers, and institutions to develop new ways of analysing, designing, and communicating space.
For her, communication is not an accessory to architecture but an architectural act in itself. It is a practice that builds meaning, narrates complexity, and opens spaces for critical transformation.
Her work does not seek to provide definitive answers, but to sustain questions. What does it mean to belong to a space? Who is already present, and who is rendered invisible, within the idea of the city? How might we imagine environments capable of care, resistance, and adaptation?
Ultimately, she is interested in how cities speak, and in how we might learn to listen more carefully.