Tag: PuertoRico

BRIDGING THE DIVIDES, POST-DISASTER FUTURES FELLOWSHIP

Elated to have been selected as a fellow for Bridging the Divides: Post-Disaster Futures study group. Bridging the Divides is “a program funded by a 1.2-million-dollar Mellon grant that was awarded to CENTRO, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College-CUNY, to support the establishment of collaborative, interdisciplinary study groups composed of artists, scholars, and journalists from across Puerto Rico and its diasporas.” In its second iteration, “the second group, which focuses on the theme of Post-Disaster Futures, is now hosted at Princeton University and led by current Princeton Professor Dr. Yarimar Bonilla and Dr. Deepak Lamba-Nieves, who is…
UNNATURAL DISASTER

The project Spatializing Debt: A Visual Audit was presented at Columbia GSAPP after an invitation by the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation from Columbia University during the panel Unnatural Disaster: Infrastructure in Puerto Rico before, during, and after Hurricane Maria on November 9, 2018. More information about the event and its video recording can be accessed here.
SPATIALIZING DEBT: A VISUAL AUDIT

Spatializing Debt: A Visual Auditing examines the intersection of architecture, political economy and visual imaginaries with the logics of state-financial debt under Puerto Rico’s current status, by giving territorial, spatial, and visual dimension to the so-called public debt. Investment Firms Information by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo of Puerto Rico. Researcher, ongoing, 2017.
CIUDADLAB: BRAZIL, THE FORM OF DESIRE

After researching the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and São Paulo in Brazil we identified leisure, void, security, industry, body, tourism and monumentality as drivers of the forms of desire. With and ever expanding economy, Brazil has become the world’s eighth economy and the destination for countless local and international events. The research was organized through three analytical lenses -the Imagined City, the Ideological City and the Informal City- and worked with the hypothesis that in Brazil the imaginary of desire is employed to promulgate the worshipping of the body, the architectural object and the staging of both within…
POLIMORFO

Polimorfo is the journal of the School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. Founder, Editor, Designer, 2009-2011 (in collaboration with Oscar Oliver-Didier). PDF available online here.
SENSE RECESSION: WHAT COMES NEXT?

Sense Recession: What Comes Next? was a lecture series inquiring and exploring architectural practices as they emerged or were formulated out of the financial crash (not crisis) of 2008. Invited Lecturers: Xavi Sempere – Culdesac, Spain; José Luis Vallejo & Belinda Tato, Ecosistema Urbano, Spain; Giancarlo Mazzanti – Colombia; Carmina Sánchez del Valle, Hampton University, USA; Sabine Müller – SMAQ, Germany; Mitch McEwen – SUPERFRONT, USA. Lecture Series Director, School of Architecture, Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, 2009-2010. (Complete lecture series text below) We are reaching the end of the 21st century’s first decade and it would seem that architecture…
ROUNDTABLE SERIES

The Roundtable Discussion Series began as a complement to the first CIUDADLAB course offered at ArqPoli in 2005. The conversations were conducted with the idea of bringing to the school multi-disciplinary issues pertinent to our discipline. The invited panelists came from a wide spectrum and fields, provoking more than mere conversations, but vivid debates that nurtured the students’ concerns and understanding of the career’s scope. – Suburban City: Mutation and Variation of the Dispersed Model – Method, Concept, Matter: the Re-education of Architecture – Leisure and Business: the New Geographies of Public Space – The Neoliberal Landscape: the Territory Economics…
FLMM NEW VISITORS CENTER

The project, the new Visitors Center and Museum for the Luis Muñoz Marín Foundation in San Juan, Puerto Rico, situates itself as a mediator and threshold between a large semi-urban forest and a historic site grouping the former home and small buildings of the owners, where the house of the first elected governor of Puerto Rico is located. A bold two-pieces volume resembles and occupied the space of a natural border that existed before, while providing a threshold welcoming flows through the building to the site and the forest. View it published in Divisare and ArchDaily. Project Lead Designer for Toro Ferrer Arquitectos, 2006-2013. AIA…
PLACE AND CONTEXT STUDIO

For the initial part of the course, first year undergraduate students where confronted to notions of place and context. An analytical city study was developed through the layering of cartographic drawings including a vast variety of the city’s visible and invisible infrastructure. Mixed media, hand drawn. Studio Instructor, 2007.
ANARCHIST GARDENER

Led by pedestrian deity (Finnish architect Marco Casagrande), the anarchist gardener performance developed 12 “industrial zen gardens” during a 9 hour walking performance between the cities of Bayamón and San Juan. The anarchist gardener aimed for a better pedestrian city lost to vehicles. Performance, 2003.
VALPARAISO OR AN ANAMNESTIC MEMORY

Memory is a vital resource for trying to explain cities. Valparaíso in Chile has been no exception as evidenced by the efforts that made the city a World Heritage Site (UNESCO) after this project began in 2002. Therefore, critical analysis of heritage-related memory could present operational and architectural alternatives in the exercise of articulating historical value. With this premise, the project proposes an alternative for the staging of the city through its “documents of the past,” with a scenery dominated by the transient and imagination as a tool of memory. The city’s geographic amphitheater-like formation strengthens the relationship with the…