Teaching Philosophy

My Teaching in the Context of Research and Practice

Interdisciplinarity is the key element underlying my teaching, scholarship, and practice. For me, architecture is most beautiful when it hybridizes with other disciplines. I am particularly interested in the third space that emerges in the interplay between architecture, anthropology, and social action practice.

In the architectural field, an interdisciplinary approach like mine offers both opportunities and challenges. The main challenge is that the agendas of architectural practice and theory (especially critical theory), can easily appear to be in conflict. Architectural practice is solution-based (as architects, we start a design project by looking for solutions to a given problem). By contrast, critical theory may be instead problem-based (as researchers, we identify problems that might not have been noticed or acknowledged before). Considering this essential difference, it is easy to understand how the interests of the practitioner and those of the critical theorist could be at odds.

I have found that the best way to bridge this disconnection is through the act of mutual learning, in a process that can be best described as practice as research and teaching as practice. I understand practice as research in the sense that the field of architectural practice, specifically the act of construction, provides an endless source of research questions and answers. Regarding teaching as practice, I assume that teaching is implicit to architectural practice, and I do not really draw a line between them. Practice is central in my courses, but I also conduct my construction practice as an act of mutual learning with community partners.

Thus, I conduct my architectural practice as a field of inquiry—one that I approach with more curiosity than prescriptiveness and with more questions than answers. In my classes, I explore those questions with my students rather than simply giving them answers. Consequently, and just like my practice, my classes have a strong participatory focus: I aim to learn with my students rather than solely to teach them.

By relying on participation in both my practice and teaching, I seek to position myself as a facilitator as well as a co-learner. Since I see the process of education as learning together more than as simply educating others, my love for teaching is ultimately a celebration of having learned.

Thus, in my work, teaching bridges research and practice, and it does it in an endless loop: Any newly gained knowledge from the process of mutual learning nurtures practice, and soon enough new research questions emerge to continue the cycle. In this way, both practice and research perpetually expand.

By making this approach the heart of my teaching philosophy, I have learned how teaching, theory, and practice can coexist and how they coexist best in an interdisciplinary setting. What emerges, through a process of intellectual alchemy, is a new conceptual universe full of opportunities.

How I Teach the Confluence between Theory and Practice While Keeping Social Concerns in Mind

Just as my professional work is a hybrid between architectural theory and practice, in my teaching I also fulfill the roles of both theorist and practitioner, usually embodying both at once. This is best exemplified in The Language of Architecture, a course in which I combine the theory and practice of architecture as a single body of thinking. In this introductory course, students learn about what architects do and how our role is conceptualized from a theoretical standpoint.

Whereas I teach other courses that are more directly connected to the social aspects of architectural practice, in The Language of Architecture I focus on mainstream architecture—for example, Greek and Roman architectural history. As a Colombia-born individual who was raised in a very different set of socio-economic and cultural circumstances, that type of architecture has been quite distant from my personal experience. However, I have developed a way to take advantage of my sense of disconnection and ultimately alienation from that architecture: I teach this course as an outsider. While I offer all the relevant historical and other knowledge, I read this architecture from the viewpoint of the outsider—the historically excluded, Third World- born and -raised individual.

Such a reading gives this course a naturally critical contextualization of mainstream architecture as it studies it from the outside, almost like an ethnographic subject—my exotic other. In general, the way I teach architecture in this course sounds something like, “This is how this crazy thing called the profession of the architect works.”

I have found this outsider’s view of the architectural field to be quite effective pedagogically for most students in the course, because they are generally from other academic areas (e.g., neuroscience or computer science) and/or have little to no previous background in architecture. Moreover, this perspective on architecture particularly resonates with those students who, like me, are also outsiders—including students from historically, ethnically, culturally, and socio-economically marginalized groups. After taking the course, some of these students actually decide to pursue the Architectural Studies major at Amherst College, and I become their advisor.

I believe it is crucial to attract students from underrepresented groups to architectural education because, throughout most of its history, the discipline of architecture has quite visibly lacked diversity. To give an idea of the depth of this problem, according to recent figures (as of 2024) from the US National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB), less than two percent of certified architects in the United States are Black, and less than five percent are Latino/a.

Architectural Practice in the Context of my Teaching

The courses I teach, which include both theory and field-based courses, are focused on architectural practice. First, my theory-focused courses are deeply grounded in the practice of architecture, covering, for example, the practice of sustainable design, low- income housing policy and practice, and the interdisciplinary field of architectural anthropology.

Second, my field-based courses focus on social design practice and use a service learning model, which emphasizes community service. Following this model, as students learn, they also generate architecture- or planning-related products that serve a social purpose. These projects are delivered to stakeholders in the communities where this academic work takes place.

Third, I advise theses that, like my classes, reflect my interest in expanding the field of architecture toward more profound social engagement. Some of the topics of theses I have advised include: public space and housing rights in Holyoke (MA), public schools in NYC, the perils of entrepreneur-led redevelopment in Detroit, gentrification in Boston’s Chinatown, and “green gentrification” in Boston’s Millennium Park and the High Line in NYC. Regarding international topics, I have advised theses on alternative forms of currency in Nairobi as well as people’s technological resourcefulness in this city’s largest slum, slums and water access in Addis Ababa, privatization of state housing in Moscow and other Russian cities, and the “okupa” movement of housing takeover by homeless families in Barcelona.

In terms of social impact, I consider the work that students carry out with my pedagogical support, either through practice-based courses or theses, to be just as important as my own professional work. This is partly what I understand as teaching as practice.