Book Presentation: Liminal Architecture

Book Presentation: Liminal Architecture. Enduring Experimentation on the Thresholds between Gorizia and Nova Gorica (Ancsa Documenti 2025)

The volume explores how the Italian-Slovenian border between Gorizia and Nova Gorica has been conceived not as a limit, but as a threshold: a device for architectural and urban design. Here, architecture has had to formulate design strategies to cross, reactivate, and redesign the socio-spatial and temporal threshold, shaping a permanent laboratory for design experimentation.

The research questions the role of architecture in borderlands and border territories, grounding the situated observation in Gorizia and Nova Gorica to frame a situated perspective—a lens capable of focusing architectural thinking and praxis—and opening the reflection to multidisciplinary dialogue. 

The event is conceived as a moment of debate and in-depth discussion. Program Institutional Greetings Chiara Gatta, Deputy Mayor of the Municipality of Gorizia Presenting the Volume Bruna Di Palma, Vice-President ANCSA Alessandro Benetti, ANCSA Board Member Giovanni Fraziano, University of Trieste Valentina Rodani, The Author More Information Valentina Rodani. Architettura liminale. 

Sperimentazione permanente sulle soglie tra Gorizia e Nova Gorica (Liminal Architecture. Permanent Experimentation on the Thresholds between Gorizia and Nova Gorica). Bergamo: Ancsa Documenti, 2025. ISBN 9791282256001. With texts by: Alessandro Benetti, Giovanni Corbellini, Giovanni Fraziano. The volume is the result of the author's doctoral research entitled Liminal Architecture. 

Enduring Experimentation on the Threshold of the Moving Border, which was defended with honors at the joint-university PhD program in Civil-Environmental Engineering and Architecture of the University of Trieste and the University of Udine in 2022, and was awarded the Premio Gubbio by ANCSA (Associazione Nazionale Centri Storico-Artistici) in 2024 for the Doctoral Thesis section.

It is published in monographic form in the Ancsa Documenti Series in 2025. Valentina Rodani is an Architect, who graduated in Architecture with honors from the University of Trieste (2017).

She was a visiting doctoral researcher at the University of Ljubljana (2021) and holds a Doctor Europaeus PhD in Architectural and Urban Composition with honors from the Universities of Trieste and Udine (2022). She is currently a research fellow at the Politecnico di Milano. Her research interweaves theoretical-critical analysis and design praxis to explore the spatialities of borders and frontiers, exile, and migration, through a reading that connects architecture, landscape, and anthropology.