Gia Daskalakis

Gia Daskalakis teaches core and advanced architecture and design studios, as well as history, theory, and practice seminars in the undergraduate and graduate programs in the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. She is principle of Das:20 Architecture Studio, a practice involved in built commissions and speculative research/design projects. Her teaching and practice intertwine to serve as a laboratory for observing and operating in an increasingly complex and fragile world. Projects deploy strategies that engage multiple scales of the environment simultaneously from the territorial, to the landscape, to the building and room. 

Daskalakis’ current research focuses on the ethical, health, and environmental impacts of animal agriculture. She asks the question, “what if the entire world population moved to a plant-based diet?” Design case studies experiment with the 40% of habitable world land gradually made available and imagines alternative land uses, and ecological, programmatic, social, and spatial assemblages. 

She is co-editor and author of “Stalking Detroit,” published bilingually in English and Spanish by Actar, and recently released as a second edition e-book. She is a past Muschenheim Fellow at the University of Michigan and a recipient of the Young Architects Forum Competition Award from the Architectural League of New York. Essays and design work have been published in Human Cities, Celebrating Public Space, Quaderns d’Arquitectura I Urbanisme (Spain), Summa (Argentina), and On Diseno (Spain). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably at the Union of International Architects Congress in Barcelona, and as part of the traveling European and North American Landscape Urbanism Exhibition. 

She holds a doctorate diploma from the Universidad Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design.