I am an architect, artist, researcher, and teacher working through drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, and direct interventions in existing buildings.

My work begins in the interval between the end of a building’s use and the unresolved prospect of its demolition. Here, the structure remains property, but property no longer exhausts what it is; nor is it yet debris. As program recedes, matter persists. The building becomes available to other readings and relations. What remains active within it emerges through encounter, through interpretation, intervention, and the changes those encounters produce. I understand this as process of a necessary architectural transmutation: the production of form through the alteration of what already exists.

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My research on Gordon Matta-Clark gave me a historical language for an operation already present in my own life and practice. I do not approach his building cuts as images to repeat, but as a point of departure. My work begins where the familiar image of the cut often ends: with what the incision releases, what remains afterward, and what can still be constructed from it.

For me, cutting is both a material operation and a method of thought. It makes visible what continuity conceals. I cut to understand how things hold together—and how they might be assembled otherwise.

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CUT.

I'm working the act cut as an operation called scission: a cut that interrupts continuity to reveal hidden relations and other possible configurations.

Cutting is  subtractive a while doing so, it expose, displace, and reconnect. The cut itself becomes the proposal.

My doctoral research, SCISSION: The Architectural Collage and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Circus or The Caribbean Orange, examined how a geometry drawn on paper became a spatial and material event. Through archival research, I studied Circus as a process of drawings, tools, decisions, and transformations rather than as a finished image.

This research continues in my practice. I use architecture to work through matter, memory, transformation, and loss. Architecture is my language, but not the limit of what I am trying to say.

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PEEL.

Carefully. Lovingly. In this life, we must live as much as possible.

Peeling is neither demolition nor preservation. It keeps the relation between surface and body visible. It exposes what has been concealed while allowing the fragment to remain attached. Very similar to everyday life.​

In CYRUS, my current project, a condemned Gothic vernacular barn in rural Nebraska becomes both the material of this inquiry and the scale at which it is tested. Its surfaces are opened, peeled, displaced, and held under tension. The barn becomes sculpture, instrument, stage, and evidence: a structure made to register its own transformation.

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REVEAL.

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I come from Chilean Patagonia, where the land breaks. The palafitos of Chiloé follow me, architectures suspended between land and water, permanence and instability. Their counter-poetics, together with magical realism, remain among my deepest sources of inspiration.

These traditions treat fragmentation as a condition of both an unstable world and an unsettled inner life.

From the work of Edward Rojas, Paul Emmons, Marco Frascari, Marcia Feuerstein, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, I draw a way of doing theory that is slow, textual, embodied, and imaginative. Theory, it is another way of attending to what is happening around me.

My work has been presented in Chile, Croatia, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States, at venues and exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Valdivia, Santa Rosa Gallery in Santiago, and Homesick at the District Architecture Center, AIA|DC, in Washington, D.C. My writing includes chapters in the Routledge volumes like Finishing: The End of Architecture and (Un)Common Precedents in Architecture, as well as contributions to other books chapters and journals. I'm looking forward to publish a book. 

I studied architecture at the Universidad Austral de Chile, with further study supported by the DAAD at the Technical University of Munich. I completed a master’s degree in Cultural Heritage at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and hold a PhD in Architecture and Design Research from Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. I live and work in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I teach architectural design, history, and theory at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

My work opens a field in which architecture becomes a means of thinking and expressing what the discipline has traditionally left outside, while expanding its own possibilities.

I cut to understand how things hold together and how they might be assembled otherwise.