Inaugural Professorial Lecture
Professor Paolo Tombesi
Chair in Construction
6:30 -7:30pm
Tuesday, 20 October
Prince Philip Theatre
Ground Floor, Architecture Building
The University of Melbourne
Inventing Innovation
What is the role of technical progress within a construction sector committed to the sustainable generation of social and economic value? Is the definition of progress in construction tied to the nature of building work and the composition of building markets, or is it the result of factors external to the industry? In either case, can we design the course of history by establishing preferred technological trajectories?
The lecture will seek answers to these questions, central to Australia’s current economic and policy environment, by drawing attention to the supply-demand relationships underpinning construction artifacts, and clarifying the difference between ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’ in the development of building products. In doing so, the discussion will introduce two significant elements in the academia/industry/government relationship in construction: 1) the cost-benefit equation in the generation of new knowledge; and 2) the possible qualitative distribution of research investment opportunities across markets.
Trained as an architect in Italy, Paolo Tombesi holds the Chair in Construction at the University of Melbourne. From 2009 he is also Visiting Professor at the School of Construction Management and Engineering of the University of Reading (UK). Between 2005 and 2009 he was an Italian Government Research Fellow at the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic of Turin as part of ‘Brain Return’, a national program designed to build new research capacity in the country.
The overarching concern of Professor Tombesi’s work is the relationship between the intellectual dimension of building and the socio-technical aspects of building procurement. His studies are based on the examination of construction artifacts within their industrial and regional context, in a way that blends the study of professional activity with economic geography, and technical culture with policy-making. An international authority on the organisation of architectural practice and the analysis of the building process, he has been drawing on microeconomics and political economy as well as labour and industrial theory to examine the relationship between design, built quality, technological innovation and construction markets.
A former Fulbright Fellow at the University of California at Los Angeles, Paolo Tombesi has a PhD in architectural practice and regional development from the same university. Since 2004, he has secured multiple competitive research grants for projects that span from the future of digital outsourcing in construction to the analysis of the innovation potential of iconic public buildings, the morphology of high-density housing in Victoria to occupational health and safety responsibilities in design.
Over the last 20 years he has contributed to some of the world’s leading architectural and building periodicals. Between 1990 and 1996 he was the Los Angeles correspondent for Casabella, and he is currently on the editorial boards of Construction Management and Economics and UME. He writes opinion pieces for the Italian Il Giornale dell’Architettura and the Californian arcCA.
Between 2002 and 2006 he was a board member of the Washington-based Journal of Architectural Education. His writings have also appeared in Architectural Research Quarterly, Architecture Australia, Art China,Building Research and Information, Cartas Urbanas, Center, Contemporary, Costruire, Domus, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Architecture, Harvard Design Magazine, and Space & Society.
To date he has given over thirty public lectures, advanced seminars and keynote addresses around the world, and taught at several universities. In 2004, he was scholar in residence at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, and in 2006 lectured at Yale. In 2005, he was one of the three recipients of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ research award, the Sisalation Prize. The resulting book, Looking Ahead: Defining the Terms of a Sustainable Architectural Profession, was launched in 2007.