A Victorian architect has been awarded an eight-week residency in Italy to pursue interdisciplinary research, develop their practice and build international connections.
Lisa Garner has been awarded the 2025–26 Alastair Swayn Foundation–RMIT Architecture Affiliated Fellowship. As part of the fellowship, Garner will engage in interdisciplinary research at the American Academy, an American institution in Rome that accommodates independent studies and advanced research in fine arts and humanities.
Garner is an architect and director of Lian, an emerging architecture practice focused on rethinking how housing can be more sustainable, adaptable and community centred. Garner and Andrej Vodstrcil co-founded the practice following the success of their winning entry in the Victorian Government’s Future Homes competition in 2020. Since then, she has led a range of projects, including a series of pattern book apartment designs for the state government, an eight-storey Nightingale Housing development, and various residential renovations and small-scale commercial projects.
Over the course of the eight-week fellowship, Garner will undertake a research project titled Abitare insieme – Living together – Learning from Italy: Multigenerational Housing for Australia. Her project will explore Italy’s multigenerational housing traditions through, both historical and contemporary. The research will primarily focus on spatial configurations, adaptive reuse and incremental expansion strategies that enable homes to evolve over generations, as well as the policy and economic models that support these housing typologies.
The research findings will help inform how similar design approaches might be adapted for use in an Australian context.
“This fellowship is an exciting chance to learn from housing traditions in Italy that place family, adaptability, and care at their core. I look forward to exploring how these ideas might inform more flexible and supportive housing in Australia,” Garner said.
The Alastair Swayn Foundation and RMIT University, the 2025–26 Alastair Swayn Foundation-RMIT Architecture Affiliated Fellowship is offered to one successful applicant each year. Early and mid-career architects, landscape architects and design professionals from across Australia are eligible for the fellowship.
Source: Architecture - architectureau
