Eva Franch i Gilabert

Eva Franch i Gilabert is an architect, curator, educator and researcher based in Barcelona, Prague, and New York. With a focus on curatorial activism and planetary pedagogies and practices, her work articulates global aspirations from local perspectives through the creation of new narratives and potential futures. Franch is co-founder of FAST, a research and curatorial platform working across architecture, environmental imaginaries, and civic technology.

Franch is a professor at UMPRUM, the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague, Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University GSAPP and a Distinguished Professor at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Art. During the last five years Franch has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and Cooper Union in the United States, an External Examiner at the Royal College of Art in London and the AAM USI Architecture School in Mendrisio as well as the co-founder and Artistic Director of Model, Barcelona’s Architecture Festival, organized by the Barcelona City Council towards the 2026 World Capital of Architecture and UIA Congress.

With more than a decade of experience leading pioneering institutions, Franch has served as director of the Architectural Association in London and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. She has co-curated, designed and produced the 2025 Catalan participation at the Venice Architecture Biennale with the project Water Parliaments and the U.S. Pavilion in 2014 with the project OfficeUS, which resulted in three publications: Manual, Atlas, and Agenda (Lars Müller).

Franch has lectured worldwide and curated international projects such as Letters to the Mayor, with editions in over 20 cities, including Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Taipei, Berlin, and New York. She has curated critical projects like Picasso: Untitled at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, and The Architects, a video piece in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, produced for the OfficeUS project. Her work has received support from dozens of public and private institutions and organizations including the Graham Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the State Department. Franch has been recognized by the American Institute of Architects in New York for her contributions to architecture in 2018 and received the Alumni Award given to one person each year from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in 2019. She was named Architect of the Year by The New York Times / T Magazine Spain in 2019, listed as one of London’s most influential people by the Evening Standard in 2018, honored as one of the “New Change Makers” in 2020 and featured in Best of Spain by AD Magazine in 2024.

Her latest publication “100 Words for Water: a Projective Ecosocial Vocabulary” (2025 Lars Müller) presents texts by philosophers, scientists, artists, activistas, designers and architects from across the globe reflecting on the role of water in the building of hopeful futures.