Francesca Paola Piccolo

Francesca Paola Piccolo is an EU licensed architect. She graduated with honors from the University of Naples “Federico II” (Italy), obtaining a master’s degree in “Architecture and Building Engineering-Architecture”.

During her educational path she specialized on subjects such as history, building construction and restoration, focusing on 20th-century heritage as main field of interest. At the end of her master’s studies in 2015, she was an exchange student at University of Oulu with the aim of deepening her knowledge on modernism conservation. While in Finland, she carried out research for her master’s thesis on Alvar Aalto’s silo in Toppila in collaboration with City of Oulu. She has been living and working as an architect in the Nordic country since then. She dealt with brand-new design plans, restoration projects and historical surveys, developing a strong interest for HBIM.

Currently, she is a doctoral researcher at the Oulu School of Architecture and is part of the “Memory of the City” research team funded by Kone Foundation.
Her PhD project purposes to examine the challenges of 20th-century heritage conservation. More specifically, her work investigates the impact of the lack of interest in the modern heritage and the effects of the increasing popularity of traditional trends, paying special attention to the Finnish status quo.

Research interests

• Conservation of 20th-century architecture
• History of architecture
• Cultural Heritage
• HBIM