Architect Savina is Senior Tutor on the Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) programme at the Royal College of Art. She has been teaching IDE since 2004.
Savina graduated in Architecture at the Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria (Italy) and qualified as an architect in 2001. She worked for her family’s architectural firm before moving to London in 2002. She has worked as Project Architect for several architectural and interdisciplinary firms including Foster + Partners and has collaborated as Design and Innovation consultant with Richard Rogers & Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects.
She has created and led several inter-institutional projects including: Departure Lounge, The Encounter, and Re-mix, which investigated the controversial dynamics of interdisciplinary creative collaborations. She was team leader in a series of workshops organised by the Olympic Delivery Authority and InnovationRCA to deliver design ideas for the 2012 Olympic Park.
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Research interests
Savina’s research focuses on the exploration of interdisciplinary processes leading to the creation of new knowledge. Her research aims at defining the chameleonic identity of the Interdisciplinarian and investigates the impact of interdisciplinary approaches on higher education.
Her research projects and publications explore and analyse key aspects of interdisciplinary design practice including conflicts, miscommunications and the capability to draw not obvious correlations across diverse fields.
Practice
In 2008 Savina co-founded NOI architects, an interdisciplinary architectural firm based in London that works in the diverse fields of architecture, design and art. Her portfolio includes high-rise residential and commercial building, hotels, lighting systems, modular residential systems, kinetic and site-specific installations. Her work has been exhibited in UK and abroad.
Current and recent projects
Current and Recent Projects
Departure Lounge is an experimental project involving students and senior staff from across the RCA, the London Festival of Architecture and the Serpentine Gallery.
The project explores the potentials and strengths of interdisciplinary collaborations to reveal the potentials latent within the city by reinterpreting the urban environment and triggering new metropolitan dynamics.
Students from across the RCA were selected to reinterpret the brief of the project in which the themes of time, place and encounter were encompassed by architectural space, urban intervention and the physical transience of every day experience. Five teams were assembled to bring together Fine Art, Design and Architecture, Fashion and Applied Arts students with the intention of a cross-disciplinary outcome being focussed upon problem solving, working with processes and narrating stories. The teams’ work embodies the contrast between the sense of familiar place and the alienation of non-places, where the experience of space is fleeting and there are no interactions. The pieces/installations designed by the teams of students were part of the Departure Lounge exhibition held at the Pump House Gallery in July 2012 as part of the London Festival of Architecture.
The exhibition was co-curated by Steve Bunn and Savina Torrisi, Tutors at the Royal College of Art with design by Davide Di Pietro, Partner of NOI architects. Supported by the Innovation Design Engineering and Sculpture programmes.
Credits to: Natalia-Rozalia Avlona, Renata Heliodoro Bandeira, Geoffrey Bartholomew, Helle Bjerregaard, Bilge Nur Saltik, Joanne Wardrop, Jim Woodall, Rain Wu
External collaborations
Since 2011 Savina has been a Professor on the Master's programme in Architectural Management and Design at the IE University in Madrid. Savina has also served as external juror and lectured internationally at several universities including the Architectural Association, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Saint-Étienne, and the Kyushu University in Fukuoka.