Lisa Garner is an architect and director of LIAN Architects, an emerging practice dedicated to rethinking how housing can be more sustainable, adaptable, and community focused.

Lisa co-founded LIAN Architects following a prize-winning entry in the Victorian Government’s Future Homes competition (2020) to expand upon her interest in housing design and policy. Since then, she has led projects including a suite of pattern book apartment designs for the State government, an eight-story Nightingale Housing development, as well as numerous residential alterations, additions, and small-scale commercial projects. 

Over eight weeks of the Fellowship, Garner will develop her proposed research project, “Abitare insieme – Living together - Learning from Italy: Multigenerational Housing for Australia” at the American Academy in Rome.

Garner will explore Italy’s multigenerational housing traditions—both historic and contemporary, focusing on: spatial configurations, adaptive reuse and incremental expansion strategies that allow homes to evolve over generations and, policy and economic models that sustain these housing typologies. The research will also explore design possibilities for the Australian context.

Lisa will be undertaking her fellowship at the American Academy in Rome during May and June 2026, and will present her research later that year (TBD).