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Work

21 projects

The Thoughts

  1. behavior information modelingJAN 2026For thirty years we've been getting very good at Building Information Modeling: every beam, every duct, every clash, tracked to the millimeter.
  2. neuroaestheticsDEC 2025Neuroaesthetics is the unglamorous name for a question everyone already feels: why does one room settle you and another keep you on edge?
  3. physics solversAPR 2026A physics solver is the most honest collaborator I have: it doesn't care what I intended, only what I actually built.
  4. generative aiJUN 2024Generative AI made the inspired gesture free. Anyone can produce a thousand renders before lunch, and a render is a promise, not a product.
  5. extended realitySEP 2022I started in a lab strapping headsets onto students to see whether a lesson lands harder when you can walk around inside it.
  6. comfort as dataMAY 2026You don't walk into a room and average your experience. You walk in and the thing that's wrong is the thing you notice: the glare, the echo, the cold draft on the back of your neck.
  7. drawing as interfaceMAR 2026For most of my life the drawing was the output. You designed the thing, then you drew it to prove it existed.
  8. evolutionary searchNOV 2025Evolutionary search is what I reach for when a problem is too tangled to solve head on: describe what good looks like, then let a population of designs breed, mutate, and compete until something clever falls out.
  9. heritage meets new techAPR 2026The usual choice with an old building is a trap: treat it as a museum piece no one may touch, or drop a glass-and-steel box in the middle and call it modern.
  10. buildings that respondJUN 2026Right now a building is a fixed guess. Someone chose the ceiling height and the window size years before you arrived, and you live inside their averaged assumptions whether they fit you or not.
  11. connecting the dotsJUN 2020When the art class was asked who here dislikes drawing, mine was the only hand that went up. Awkward.
  12. pelagñouJUN 2026Some projects hand you a tool; Pelagñou handed me a library card.
  13. explaining thingsJUL 2026How do you explain a complex, honestly boring technical subject so someone leans in instead of glazing over?
  14. adjacency is not accessJUN 2026A floor plan tells you which rooms touch. It will not tell you which rooms you can actually reach, and the gap between those two drawings is where the architecture is hiding.

The Lungs

RESEARCHSTUDIO AWARD

Can a dashboard run an architecture studio?

The studio's data was the architecture: a live app running a hyperbuilding designed to filter a city's air.

MACAD STUDIO · DATA TEAM OF 3 · LIVE APP

VUE 3 · VITE · TAILWIND · SPECKLE · TRACKED · 3 TEAMS × 10 WEEKS

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WHAT

Santiago has an air problem, the kind that sits in the valley like a guest who will not leave. The Lungs is a hyperbuilding designed to filter 12 million m³ of air a year, and the data team of three (María Sánchez Domínguez, Lakzhmy Mari Zaro, and me) built the live web app the whole studio ran on while designing it.

WHY

The studio's data was the architecture. Three design teams, ten weeks, one shared organism: somebody had to build its nervous system, and that turned out to be the most architectural thing in the room.

HOW

  1. Build the platform in Vue 3, Vite, and Tailwind: KPIs, timelines, and team status, live for everyone instead of buried in spreadsheets.
  2. Stream the 3D models in through Speckle, so performance data sits on geometry, not beside it.
  3. Keep it running while the studio designs on top of it: the app was not documentation, it was the project's operating system.

WHAT CAME OF IT

The platform tracked three design teams across the full ten-week studio. Building a platform alongside the project it supports is messy, and the mess is the lesson: the building breathes, so does the app.