Marcelo López-Dinardi - Texas A&M University College of Architecture

Associate Professor

Marcelo López-Dinardi, an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University.

Personal Website Curriculum Vitae

Contact

Email: Marcelo López-Dinardi

Phone: (979) 862-2150

Location: Langford A 434

Office Hours: By appointment (via email).

Architecture from Public to Commons – Book

An Agenda for BCS – Research

Biography

Marcelo López-Dinardi is an Associate Professor of architecture at Texas A&M University. His work explores architecture’s entanglements with culture. He is the editor of Architecture from Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023) and Degrowth (ARQ, 2022), and co-editor of Promiscuous Encounters (GSAPP Books, 2013). López-Dinardi’s words and works have been featured in the JUMEX Museum, Venice Biennale, MoCAD, Istanbul Design Biennial, Citygroup, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Old Armory of the Spanish Navy of Puerto Rico’s National Gallery, MAC-PR, CAAPPR, The Avery Review, The Architect’s Newspaper, JSAH, Domus, Art Forum, URBAN_NEXT, PLAT, ARQ, Materia, and Bitácora Arquitectura among others.

López-Dinardi is a Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research 2025-26 Faculty Research Fellow. He was a 2023-2024 Bridging the Divides: Post-Disaster Futures Fellow for CENTRO-Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College with a project examining cement’s entanglements with culture in Puerto Rico. Before joining Texas A&M, he was a Fellow for the New Museum’s Ideas City Athens and Arles, and taught at Barnard+Columbia, NJIT, Pratt Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, RISD, and the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (PUPR 2005-2011) where he co-founded the research and exhibition platform CIUDADLAB and the school’s journal Polimorfo. His architectural design work has been awarded several times by the AIA and the Puerto Rico Architect’s Association. In 2022, he was nationally elected At-Large Director for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s (ACSA) Board of Directors for 2022-2025. At Texas A&M he is an affiliated faculty for the Humanities and the Anthropocene group. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the PUPR (cum laude) and an MS in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices for architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.

Education

M.S. C.C.C.P.

Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practices for Architecture
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP)
Columbia University in the City of New York
2013

B.Arch.

Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico
2004, Cum Laude

Scholarly Interests

López-Dinardi’s work explores architecture’s entanglements with culture.

Projects + Creative Works

Architecture from Public to Commons

The book provides an urgent framework and collective reflection on understanding how to reconsider and recast architecture within ideas and politics of the commons and practices of commoning.

What commons, for what socialnesses? This is the question this book addresses. This convenes a specific mode of inquiry that characterizes a new network of researchers and thinkers gathered in this volume, who are gaining a growing voice in the field of critical architectural practices.

Words from the Preface by Andrés Jaque, Dean and Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University.

Available online here: https://www.routledge.com/Architecture-from-Public-to-Commons/Lopez-Dinardi/p/book/9781032394459 Discount Code: ESA33

DEGROWTH

I served as Guest Editor for the academic journal ARQ 111 on the theme of DEGROWTH. The editorial asks, ‘is degrowth appropriate for all geographies and cultures? Is it worth exploring if it is not an anti-capitalist pursuit? Who is responsible, and who pays the price of degrowth? And for us, what is the role of architecture in this complex web of relational logistics?’ The discussion of degrowth proposed is broadly organized by situating geographies and timelines. Contributors share their experience, knowledge, and projects from Ukraine to South Africa, Europe, the Arab Gulf, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

MAKING THE PUBLIC–COMMONS

Is an installation and a conversations-marathon project motivated by the ambition and need to elaborate our positions towards the making and building public–commons, primarily through an act of appearance and conversation much required in our cultural context. The project relies mainly on direct dialogue and embodied engagement, two crucial forms of impact in our contemporary culture beyond quantitative metrics. It proposes and promotes dialogue and conversations around topics of—but not limited to, how and what constitutes the public and the commons, and why it is critical to appear in public today as we continue to battle the isolating impact of the global pandemic. Conversations include institutions, commoning, landscapes, justice, measures, cooperation, water, ecologies, language, and appearance. MAKING THE PUBLIC–COMMONS is conceived, curated, and organized by Marcelo López-Dinardi.

www.mtp-c.info

BCSAGENDA

As a newcomer faculty to Texas in the Fall of 2018, I decided to dedicate most of my architecture studios—junior, senior, and graduate, to learn about the cities of Bryan and College Station (BCS), their logic, motivations, and potential pitfalls. These studios were a new endeavor to many. The thinking of architecture as a cultural product in dialogue with territorial complexities has been the driving force to these research-based studios. We carefully considered, investigated, pondered, and visualized the multiplicity of factors that we understood are shaping the cities. We did this primarily through mapping. There are tens of information and analysis maps made through publicly available data. In addition, we proposed a series of urban scale projects in dialogue with those findings. An Agenda for BCS is a digital book that documents that effort to expand the scope and possibilities for how we imagine this territory.

Digital Book with tens of maps and 20 projects shaping the agenda can be found at BCSAGENDA