Fabiana Possamai Wills

ABout Fabiana

Fabiana Possamai Wills is an architect and urban designer. Her interdisciplinary work has allowed her to explore on the renewal of inactive landscapes, sprawling urban areas, and the intersection between infrastructure and architecture to generate strategies that promote sustainable environments and the activation of urban spaces.

She is currently an adjunct professor at Florida International University and Florida Atlantic University in the Department of Architecture, as well as an invited professor at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas in the Department of Architecture and Urbanism. Fabiana is the founder of Lugar Común Arquitectura, an architecture and urban design project and research studio based in Venezuela and the US, and has finished several projects since 2009. She was invited to the XI National Biennial of Architecture 2014 in Caracas, Venezuela, and the X Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism 2016 in Sao Paolo, Brazil with the project “La Casa de la Abuela”. In 2012 she was invited to participate in the Glen Murcutt International Master Class. Her work has been recently published in “Entre Rayas 132, La Casa: Practica, Docencia, e Investigacion, November 2019”.

Fabiana has a Bachelor degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Universidad Central de Venezuela and a Master degree in Advanced Architectural Design from the California College of the Arts. She is a registered architect in Venezuela since 2009.

What did you do before you came to CCA? Why did you decide to study Urban Works?

Before coming to CCA I had a practice in Venezuela and was working mainly on residential and commercial projects, my passion had always been to work on urban-scale projects for the city, but the political and economic realities of my country didn’t allow for that. In 2014 I left Venezuela and looked at opportunities for a post-professional degree that was more inclined with my interests and would satisfy my need to work in urban environments with an impact on the public, I studied in France in the Architecture des Milieux program at Ecole Special d’Architecture and then found out about the Urban Works Program at CCA and quickly realized it was a perfect fit for me. The program approached urban design seen through a sensitive and broader lens that addressed the political, social, and environmental aspects of a community and I found these aspects extremely relevant in today’s global context.

Can you describe your time at CCA? What were some of the projects you did or were involved in that meant the most to you, and what did you learn from your time here?

During my time at CCA, I had the pleasure to meet professors that broadened the way I understood urban design and the impact it has on a large scale in multiple aspects of our lives. I was introduced to new concepts that in the Latin American context where I performed as an architect, were not discussed or not addressed due to the lack of infrastructure. I was involved in a project that dealt with the housing crisis in San Francisco, we approached it as a spatial issue that must be addressed at the urban scale. The goal was to add 100,000 housing units, proposing new forms of density that challenged the relationship between housing prototypes and public space and infrastructure, topography, and land ownership. I also worked on a project that taught us to think of architecture in a territorial scale. It intended to create new urban typologies with a domestic and public program in the hinterland regions, we worked in Stockton where communities would migrate due to the cost of rent in the city and the future development of the highspeed train so new infrastructures would be needed in the area.

Horizontalism, Lateral Density for the next 100,000 in SF. 2015.

Design for developing integration strategies on the disarticulated network of open spaces in the Divisadero neighborhood.

Horizontalism, Lateral Density for the next 100,000 in SF. 2015.

The Divisadero area presented a duality between the traditional San Francisco grid with its Victorian architecture and the contemporary development of new housing. These do not reconcile with each other and the grid as a unifying and connecting tool is no longer legible, creating invisible but very tangible frontiers.

Peripheral Centers. Stockton, California. 2016

Using water as a tool to create community in suburbia, the investigation seeks to understand this new way of urbanism not as points of inscription or for its tangible elements and infrastructures, but as a whole system in permanent change.

Peripheral Centers. Stockton, California. 2016

Water fluctuates with the passage of time and allows the system to be in permanent change, this was used as a tool to reinvent the relationship of the houses with the site while enhancing the interaction between the people in the community.

Casa G (under construction) / Lugar Comun Arquitectura. Caracas, Venezuela 2021

The house is understood as a threshold that is waiting to be crossed, between the landscape in the access area and a privileged view of the valley of Caracas, the domestic space is experienced as a "Platea" for the enjoyment of the landscape surrounding the house.

Tropical Cartographies / Design Studio 4,5,6 UCV. Caracas, Venezuela 2021

Architecture must have a sense of place, and must understand very clearly the circumstances, in terms of natural resources, human capacities and socioeconomic conditions where it is being developed to render a coherent and adapted design response.

Suburban Landscapes / Design Studio 10 FIU. Miami, Florida 2021

South Florida has embarked on an ambitious plan to connect major population centers throughout the western border along the Everglades, proposing the southwest extension of the Dolphin Expressway, a new highway network violating the limits of the current Urban Development Boundary.

Suburban Landscapes / Design Studio 10 FIU. Miami, Florida 2021

The studio focuses on the West Kendall area, a suburb of South Florida’s west edge with the Everglades, and its future expansion through the development of new forms of connectivity between the community and the existing landscape.

What kind of work have you done since you graduated? How has your education and experience at CCA related to that work?

As a professional, I have continued to work in Venezuela in several residential and commercial projects and collaborate on multidisciplinary projects that search to empower and impact communities in slums by enriching the quality of the public spaces. In the Academic, as a professor, I work on design-research-based projects that address the housing issues in America as well as engaging in large-scale territorial projects in suburban areas along the Everglades in Florida. It is thanks to my time at CCA and everything I learned that I am able to continue to pursue these matters as a form of investigation and design with my own students. Some of these projects have rendered a line of investigation that eventually I was able to share and apply in the Venezuelan context with local students, these gave them the opportunity, as I had during my time at CCA, to learn these new concepts and apply them to their contextual reality.