Personal statement

Dr Cristina González-Longo RIBA SCA RIAS FHEA FRSA is a Chartered Architect in UK and Spain and RIBA Specialist Conservation Architect (SCA). She is the Founder and Director of the MSc in Architectural Design for the Conservation of Built Heritage at the Department of Architecture of the University of Strathclyde, where she has also created and is leading the Architectural Design and Conservation Research Unit (ADCRU). Her research group deals with the challenges of conserving built heritage while allowing changes to adapt historic buildings for contemporary uses, as well as with the design of new buildings to conserve the environment, which requires an interdisciplinary approach. After graduating at the School of Architecture of the Technical University of Madrid (ETSAM), Cristina spent three years in Rome with a scholarship from the Italian Government to study architectural conservation at the prestigious Specialisation School of the Sapienza University of Rome. On completion of the course, she won a government competition to conserve a twelve-century church in Spain, where she set her practice in 1996. Since, she had a central role in taking decisions concerning historic buildings of outstanding national and international importance and wide experience in leading the design, management and procurement of award-winning architectural projects. She was the project architect and resident architect of Queensberry House, a Category A Listed building, part of the new Scottish Parliament complex in Edinburgh (RIBA Stirling Prize 2005). She also designed Bowbridge Primary School in Newark, UK (RICS Sustainability Award 2009), with an innovative lamella glulam structure. She has lectured widely and extensible published, including her PhD thesis on preservation and transformation, published by Routledge (2020). She is, for the second term, the elected President of the ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) International Scientific Committee on Education and Training (CIF).