Charlotte Ardui

Charlotte Ardui works as a PhD-candidate at KU Leuven’s Faculty of Architecture in Brussels. Her project, entitled Faith in the Periphery [hyperlink Project Page], is a research by design trajectory that focuses on post-war churches and their potential for adaptive reuse. Capitalizing on their socially and spatially structuring capacity, the project aims at developing design strategies for the transformation of modern churches and their context. The project will explore how the reactivation of (former) church sites could be a vehicle for the sustainable redevelopment of the urban sprawl in Flanders. As a teaching assistant, she is involved in a dedicated research seminar and design studio/master dissertation studio [hyperlink KU Leuven Blog Page]. Both serve as a laboratory setting for the research project. Charlotte obtained her master’s degree in Architecture at the University of Antwerp (2016) with a thesis on housing in a collective landscape. She developed alternative development scenarios peri-urban allotments in the Campine area. Charlotte is a laureate of the ‘Meesterproef 2017 – adaptive reuse’ in which she proposed a set of low-tech process-based transformations for an ancient dovecote. Before joining the KULeuven she worked for a few years as a practicing architect, dividing her time between building site, drafting table and (international) workshops.