Spring 2024 - The Third Place Series: Javier Arpa Fernández

Javier Arpa Fernández is the Research and Education Coordinator of the Why Factory at the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft. The Why Factory is a think-tank led by Prof. Winy Maas that explores possibilities for the development of our cities by focusing on the production of models and visualisations for cities of the future. Javier currently also holds a position of lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (USA). He has been lecturer at Harvard and Columbia Universities in the USA, ENSA-Bellevile and ENSA-Versailles in France, and IE University in Spain.Javier was Editor in Chief for a+t research group, one of Europe’s leading publishers in architecture and urban design He is the curator of the exhibitions “Paris Habitat”, held at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, and is the author of the monograph “Paris Habitat: One Hundred Years of City, One Hundred Years of Life”. In 2013, he co-organized the conference “The City That Never Was” in cooperation with the Architectural League of New York. This event used the recent economic and urban crisis in Spain as a lens through which to consider future global patterns of urbanization and settlement. As lecturer and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, he is currently conducting the research project “Africa: An Atlas of Speculative Urbanization”, and curated the exhibition “African Speculations” at the Kuala Lumpur Architecture Festival.