Currently, he is a tenured lecturer in Architecture Archives of the Future at the Department of Architecture, TU Delft, and Research Affiliate at Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. Between 2021-2023, he worked as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at TU Delft and Research Associate at the Research Center for Material Culture (Netherlands), where he developed the EU-funded research project ‘Multiculturalism in the work of Aldo and Hannie van Eyck’.
The work of Aldo and Hannie van Eyck
Alejandro received his Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture from Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. Aldo van Eyck: Le Musée Imaginaire (2018) is both a short-film and a dissertation that explore the Van Eyck family house as a memory space, home and archive, an entry to document and unpack the ways architectural design, domesticity, global travels and art collecting are intersecting fields, and how they sustained a non-functionalist view from which architecture was profoundly re-conceptualized. He is the editor and Spanish translator of Van Eyck’s The Child, the City,and the Artist (El niño, la ciudad y el artista, Arquia, 2021), awarded at the XII Bienal Iberoamericana de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, as well as translator of Aldo van Eyck: The Circle and the Centre (calmo, 2023). These and many other publications consolidate him as an expert on Aldo and Hannie van Eyck’s work and thinking. On this basis, he has been invited to lecture on the Van Eycks at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences (2022), Politecnico di Milano (2023), Architecture Foundation (UK, 2020), Universidad Finis Terrae (2020), or Nieuwe Instituut (2018). With Dirk van den Heuvel, Alejandro is now co-curating the exhibition “Built Homecoming” at Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, with the results of his work on the Van Eycks’ home.
Modernity and Coloniality
In recent years, he has problematised his previous expertise through a post/de-colonial lens, focusing on questions of embodiment, cultural extraction, and intersectionality. Together with Paula Lacomba Montes, he has published on grammars of alterity, female agency within welfare state institutions, or re-enacments as a mode of architectural inquiry. Connected to these critical approaches, he was member of the organising committee of the international conference “The Observers Observed: Architectural Uses of Ethnography” (Delft and Rotterdam, 24-25 November 2021), as well as “ Architectural Archives of the Future” (Delft and Rotterdam, 22-23 November 2023). In 2022, he organised the seminar ‘From Multicultural to Pluriversal: Rethinking Universalist Notions in Modern Architecture’ at Leiden Volkenkunde (Ethnographic Museum). He also participated in the summer school ‘Learning to Unlearn Decolonially - Disobeying, Delinking and Relinking’ by University College Utrecht.
School Architecture
Next to his work on Team 10 and Aldo van Eyck, Alejandro has prominently published on post-war school architecture in its intersection with welfare states development and notions of domesticity. Led by Paula Lacomba, this line of research provides a nuanced understanding of the influence of societal transformations and cultural specificities on architectural practice, positing that understanding entrenched domestic aspects can enrich the discourse on educational spaces. They argue for situatedness and exceptionalism through comparative discussions.
Academic Background
Alejandro studied Architecture in TU Valencia (2007-2013) and defended his Ph.D. in 2018. Before his tenure at TU Delft, he has been an Invited Lecturer at Escuela de Arquitectura FAD, Universidad Finis Terrae (Chile, 2021-2022), Postdoctoral Researcher of Emergent Design Methodologies at the Department of Architecture, Aalto University (Finland, 2018-2019), and Predoctoral and Teaching Fellow at the Department of Architecture, TU Valencia (Spain, 2015-2018). He has taught Design Studios, Theory and History of Architecture, and also given lectures at different universities in Spain, UK, Netherlands and Finland. Alejandro has received several Research and Academic Prizes such as the SAH Opler Membership Grant for Emerging Scholars and Professionals (2022), the Biannual Prize for Doctoral Dissertations in the field of Architectural History (Asociación de historiadores de la Arquitectura y el Urbanismo, 2021), the Seal of Excellence Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (European Commission, 2019), and the First Prize at the II Research Awards at the XIV Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (Spanish Ministry of Development, 2018). He has published numerous articles and chapters in scientific peer-reviewed journals and has presented his work at several international conferences.He is also an editorial board member of Revue de Recherches sur Le Corbusier.
Architect and Artist
In 2019, Alejandro co-founded Arqtistic, an architecture office based in Spain, where he continues his practice as a designer and web artist.
exhibition
“Built Homecoming”
curated by Alejandro Campos and Dirk van den Heuvel
'Built Homecoming' presents the house of Aldo and Hannie van Eyck through a series of vitrines. These eight display cases capture special corners of the house, including the objects that populate these places. Through an arrangement of selected films, interior images, archival material, and artefacts from their home archive, the exhibition invites visitors to rediscover their work and ideas, while engaging with the complexities and implications of their approach to architecture and culture, particularly in relation to notions of Westernness and Eurocentricity. The choice of vitrines is crucial in this respect. Vitrines are a classic means of display, but they are also highly ambiguous: paradoxically, they are instruments of isolation and objectification, even as they provide protection and a temporary home for the selected materials. They regulate access and visibility, control the visitor’s gaze and frame the interpretation of the objects, ultimately shaping the narratives that surround them. The exhibition aims to critically rethink this framing, in order to reverse the objectifying gaze and allow for the relativity and reciprocity advocated by the Van Eycks.
Research Centre
Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam
September 2024 - January 2025
teaching
Graduation Design Studio:
Advanced Housing Design.
Ecologies of Inclusion
course coordinator: Olv Klijn
instructor and research mentor: Alejandro Campos
55 ECTS + 5 ECTS, TU Delft,
MSc3 Graduation Proje t (2nd year Master students)
2023-2024 and 2024-2025
research project
Moving Materials: Architecture, Extraction, and Colonial Railway Infrastructures in South Africa
main applicant: Meghan Ho-Tong
co-applicant: Alejandro Campos
Funded by Dutch Research Council (NWO)
NWA research into collections with a colonial context
Total funding: 34.980€. 2024-2025
conference organization
JBSC 11th Annual Conference
Staying with Modernity?
member of the organizing committee
The conference locates the problems of modernity and coloniality in architecture within the archives and institutional memory. While these are classic sites of fact-finding and the production of historical evidence, they also systematically fail to acknowledge other histories. They produce hierarchies between insider and outsider perspectives. They tend to overlook, erase even, positions and voices that are not hegemonic. How can we counter the power logic of archives and institutions?
Jaap Bakema Study Centre,
TU Delft and Nieuwe Instituut, Delft and Rotterdam
November 2024
teaching
Design Studio:
The Virtual Architecture Museum
course coordinator and instructor
The digital turn has created a new reality in the fields of design, research and knowledge dissemination, introducing new formats for public outreach and storytelling. In this studio, we collectively envision the Architecture Museum of the Future, delving into the intersections of the virtual and the real, the physical and the digital. This course examined the interconnections between the virtual and the real, advancing critical tools for the use of digital and virtual technologies in architectural design.
15 ECTS, TU Delft,
MSc3 Design Studio (1st year Master students)
April-July 2024
exhibition
Housing Studies:
The Non-Compliant
organizer (works by students)
This student-led collectively-curated exhibition proposes a closer look at the many housing projects that seek to accommodate those ‘other’ outsider categories: from physically and mentally challenged people, to young adults and elderly, young single mothers and their children, even to asylum seekers and squatters. It presents a selection of cases which takes collective living as a starting-point to go beyond the heteronormative, nuclear family, still the standard in urban planning and housing
BK Corridor Expo
Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment
April-May 2024
teaching
Housing Studies:
An Open Intersectional Archive
course coordinator and instructor
This course seeks to take an inclusive take on housing design to go beyond the strictly standardised and limiting norms that govern spatial production in architectural design. The course takes an intersectional view on the production of histories and documentation practices of architecture by focusing on twentieth-century collective housing projects in the Netherlands. It does so towards the constitution of an open intersectional archive in the form of a collectively-curated exhibition.
5 ECTS, TU Delft,
MSc2 Elective (1st year Master students)
February-April 2024
teaching
Architectural Ethnography
Theme: Ageing in the city
instructor
The elective course Architectural Ethnography explores the interrelation between the organisation of space, patterns of everyday life and the social life of buildings and public spaces. Students use research methods borrowed from Anthropology and Architecture to analyse how space, place and people are related in an urban community. This edition engaged with older city dwellers with distinct social and economic backgrounds, living in different urban areas of The Hague.
5 ECTS, TU Delft,
MSc2 Elective (1st year Master students)
February-April 2024
exhibition
At Home in the Hague: Everyday Life in Den Haag Zuidwest en Ypenburg
curated by N. Mota, A. Campos, and M. Koenraads
In two successive editions (Spring 2022 and Spring 2023), 81 students from TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment participated in the Architectural Ethnography course. The exhibition “At Home in The Hague” showcases diverse research outputs, such as analytic posters, graphic novels, collages, and stop motion movies, among others. These are complemented by a short documentary compiling excerpts from video diaries recorded by the residents.
Atrium City Hall
The Hague, Netherlands
January 2024
conference organization
JBSC 10th Annual Conference
Architecture Archives of the Future
member of the organizing committee
Jaap Bakema Study Centre,
TU Delft and Nieuwe Instituut, Delft and Rotterdam
November 2023
conference organization
5th International Conference
Critic|all: e(time)ologies
member of the scientific committee
ETSAM Madrid
Held at TU Delft, Delft
November 2023
conference paper
History meets the Body: Re-enactment as a mode of architectural inquiry
by Alejandro Campos
pp. 108-121
Tacit Knowledge in Architecture Final Conference,
TACK Network ETH Zurich, Switzerland
June 2023
conference paper
Architecture as Commoning:
A proposal for 'Mercat Central' in Valencia
by Paula Lacomba and Alejandro Campos
pp. 84-85
Situated Ecologies of Care: The 20th AHRA International Conference
Portsmouth School of Architecture, United Kingdom
October 2023
journal article
Embodiment takes command:
Reenacting Aldo and Hannie van Eyck’s homelife
by Alejandro Campos and Paula Lacomba
Grounded in an experiential understanding of architecture, this research explores ways in which architectural history can help bring works or ideas more vividly to the present. We propose an embodied visit to Aldo and Hannie van Eyck’s house in Loenen aan de Vecht. In the house, layers of temporality, materiality, everyday living, and lived experience mingle with design solutions and worldviews affecting them. Using a mix of archival, ethnographic, and performative techniques, the proposed method that adds a necessary degree of complexity to architectural history and enacts a new form of knowledge where our bodies inform the findings, from materiality to meaning. The account offers deep insights into how architectural ideas take material form, showing that specific ways of understanding history, time, or space, are indeed embodied within our built environment, and that they can only be disentangled, with the help of our bodies, by performing actions within, in and around buildings.
published by The Journal of Architecture, 28(3), 482–509
Taylor and Francis
2023
Foul Air: Aldo van Eyck on Postmodern Architecture
introduction by Alejandro Campos
pp. 5-12, 59-66
in Aldo van Eyck: The Circle and the Centre
published by calmo
Author: Aldo van Eyck
Edited by Miguel Sotos
2023, English and Spanish, 112 pages, 10 × 17 cm
Analogy versus Metaphor
Poetic Images In-Between Fields
by Alejandro Campos and Paula Lacomba
pp. 103-119
in Metaphorical Practices in Architecture: Metaphors as Method and Subject in the Production of Architecture
published by Routledge
Edited by Sarah Borree, Stephanie Knuth, Moritz Röger
2023, English, 248 pages
The Interior, Exhibition of One's Self: Architecture, Collecting, and the Everyday
by Alejandro Campos
Online Conference: The Exhibition as Interior
The Modern Interiors Research Centre,
Kingston University London.
May 2023
“Bump! - sorry. What’s this? Oh hello!” Do things have stories of their own?
by Alejandro Campos
Architecture and its Stories, Annual Conference
All-Ireland Architecture Research Group
University College Dublin and Museum of Literature Ireland
April 2022