Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino
September 9–11, 2026
Call for applications
The Castello del Valentino Dialogues is a platform that aims at creating a dynamic forum for crafting alternative ways of thinking, exploring and writing the urban. Bringing together PhD students and early career researchers with an interest in architecture and urbanism along with established scholars, writers and publishers, it invites a reflection that can challenge conventional modes of thinking and research. Participants will debate topical issues in the field of urban and architectural studies, try out new creative writing techniques and methodological tactics, and enhance their skills for presenting and publishing research.
After the first and successful edition “Tentacular Thinking! Tentacular Writing?”, inspired by relational thinkers, the second edition of the Castello del Valentino Dialogues turns to the archives as places where architectural knowledge is constructed. The Castello Dialogues 2026 explore the environmental turn recently experienced in architectural history scholarship and adjacent disciplines. As architectural history is being influenced by the questions and modes of the environmental humanities, architectural archives change and expand, challenging the very notion of human exceptionalism which is at the roots of the built environment.
The Castello Dialogues 2026 engage with the following questions: How to look at archives as dynamic objects, where human choices and more-than-human agents are, over time, layered, combined, disassembled, then rearranged together? How to listen to the plant, animal, and mineral voices preserved in human-made archives, explore their agency, and how do we speak on behalf of different entities through archival traces? How can we treat ecologies, cities, and landscapes as archives, with their own patterns of sedimented memories? How can archival knowledge be helpful when facing the crisis of narration and the unthinkable posed by the new climatic regime (Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 2016)? We may also ask: what and where is the archive if we consider the forest to be an architectural record? (Paulo Tavares, “An Architectural Botany,” Environmental Histories of Architecture, 2022); where to find the traces of the countless more-than-human actors that contributed to the making of architecture (for example, André Tavares, Architecture Follows Fish, 2024)?
We welcome applications from PhD candidates and early career scholars in the history and theory of architecture, urbanism, and urban planning, as well as in environmental, social, and cultural histories. We also invite applications from candidates in adjacent disciplines such as human geography, design studies, urban anthropology, philosophy, science and technology studies, and the arts.
We are particularly interested in candidates who are willing to rethink their own archival research in light of the many challenges that we currently face today and that give new status to archival materials, such as the environmental and biodiversity crisis, the loss of material artifacts in a virtually-driven world, and the ever-so-complex coexistence among different species. The workshop will consolidate the theoretical knowledge of researchers and will animate their methodological and field-specific creativity. Combining lectures, discussions, writing exercises and group works, it will offer a great opportunity to jump-start a PhD research project or advance knowledge on an existing one in a supportive environment by benefiting from peer analysis, constructive critique, and debate.
Keynote speaker
André Tavares, University of Porto
With the participation of
Gerlinde Verhaeghe (Politecnico di Torino/SNSF Postdoc)
Markus Lähteenmäki (editor-in-chief of Architectural Histories)
Invited tutors
Gabriele Neri, Francesca Favaro (Politecnico di Torino), Martina Motta (independent researcher)
Organising committee
Albena Yaneva, Alessandro Armando, Sofia Nannini (Politecnico di Torino)
with the help of Lorenzo Murru (Politecnico di Torino)
Application deadline: May 11, 2026.
You can read the full call for applications here: