Main Focus
- Urban development in the Italian Middle Ages
- Strategies of urban representation and identity formation
- Architecture of towers, residential houses and palaces
- Tower houses and skyscrapers since the 1950s
- Processes of cultural transfer
Research Project
Città turrite: A Visual and Urban Sociological Study on the Phenomenon of Italian Tower Cities
Curriculum Vitae
Gian Marco Hölk (b. 1995 in Düsseldorf) is an art historian and curator. He first studied contemporary dance in Hamburg and then art history and German literature at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. From 2022 to 2024, he completed a curatorial fellowship at the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach. He has been working there as a research associate since the summer of 2024. In addition, since April 2025, he has been a doctoral fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School of the Humanities at the University of Cologne and a member of the recently founded Council of Spokespersons (Sprecher:innenrat) of the Forum Italian History of Art (Forum Kunstgeschichte Italiens). As a fellow of the Ursula Nilgen Foundation at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, he is conducting research as part of his doctoral project on an urban typology that has received little attention to date but was dominant throughout Northern Italy during the Middle Ages: the tower city. The project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Gabriella Cianciolo Cosentino (University of Cologne) and Prof. Dr. Andrea von Hülsen-Esch (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf).