Currently, he is a tenured Assistant Professor in Proyectos Arquitectónicos at the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain, and Research Affiliate at the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. He co-initiated the research group Architecture. Bodies, Others with Paula Lacomba in 2025 and maintains a Youtube channel where they publish lectures and presentations. Between 2021-2024, 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 co-curated 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 “ Disentangling Coloniality and Architecture” (Delft and Rotterdam, November 2024). 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 Universitat Politècnica de València (2007-2013) and defended his Ph.D. in 2018. Before his tenure at UPV Valencia, he was a Docent at TU Delft (2021-2024), 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 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.
research group
Architecture, Bodies, Others
research group at Universitat Politècnica de València
Architecture, Bodies, Others is our new research group at the Universitat Politècnica de València, founded in January 2025. Grounded in intersectional and decolonial perspectives, we explore how bodies and cultural identities shape and are shaped by architectural spaces. We aim to challenge normative assumptions about the body and critically engaging with post/de-colonial histories in architecture, investigating how spatial practices can both reinforce and resist systems of exclusion and cultural erasure. Through case studies, archival research, and spatial analysis, we want to expand architectural discourse by recovering marginalized voices and rethinking the built environment through the lenses of embodiment, memory, and cultural entanglement.
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
book chapter
Between Myth and Bricolage:
Aldo van Eyck and Lina Bo Bardi’s engagement with world cultures
by Alejandro Campospp. 220-243
in Lina por Aldo: Afinidades no pensamento dos arquitetos Lina Bo Bardi e Aldo van Eyck
published by Editorial Cobogó
Edited by Isabel Diegues and Jorn Konijn
2024, Portuguese, 400 pages
conference presentation
Objetos Otros: Arquitectura Moderna, universalismo y colonialidad
by Alejandro CamposLa vida de las cosas: Modos de existencia, supervivencia y agencia de la cultura visual,
Centro Materia
Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero
November 2024
journal article
Female Agency in the British Ministry of Education: Mary Medd's Contribution to School Design
by Paula Lacomba and Alejandro Campos
This paper describes and discusses architect Mary Medd’s input into school development within the Ministry of Education, highlighting her agency and capacity to provide significant change in the discipline of architecture. Her contributions were outcast on two fronts: first, by an institutional framework that prioritised anonymous civil service expertise, thereby suppressing individual attribution, and second, as one half of a prosperous partnership, both professional and personal, with David Medd. Although the collective processes within public institutions normally imply that any attribution to a single person is ambiguous, this paper suggests that the institutional framework should not be interpreted as a hindrance to the recognition of Mary Medd’s authorship. The Ministry of Education offered a place for the development of a different kind of architectural practice where her individual agency could be exercised both as a designer of spatial layouts and as the main catalyst of a holistic interdisciplinary collaboration. By shedding light on the gendered disparities in architectural history and emphasising the importance of acknowledging women’s contributions, this study adds to the broader conversation on gender equity in design and education, ultimately enriching our understanding of the multifaceted history of architectural practice.
published by Architectural Histories, 12(1),
EAHN
2024
exhibition
The Virtual Architecture Museum
organizer (works by students)
In this studio, we have collectively envisioned the architecture museum of the future, delving into the intersections of the virtual and the real, the physical and the digital. The studio starts from the architecture archives of the Nieuwe Instituut as our collective disciplinary memory. Reactivating historical design knowledge helps to set the stage for the design assignment for a Virtual Architecture Museum: a mixed reality environment that combines plan analysis, narrative storytelling, and speculative design In this exhibition we shared the results of our work, with the pavilions models, films of the narratives, a curated selection of archival materials and storyboards, as well as a VR station where you could wear the headset to immerse in our virtual museum.
BK Modelhall
Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment
November 2024
visit the web exhibtion here
conference organization
In conversation with
Rolando Vázquez Melken
moderator
‘What happens in the museum is the constitution of a normative subject. A public that belongs to the cultural archive of whiteness attends the museum in order to acquire the power and entitlement of the normative subject.’
Rolando Vázquez has engaged with numerous cultural and academic institutions —in the Netherlands and beyond—regarding decoloniality. To conclude the eleventh Jaap Bakema Study Centre Conference Staying with Modernity?, Rolando Vázquez joins us for a conversation. Following two days of speaking and thinking about (de)coloniality in our practice as architects, artists, designers and researchers, this is a moment to collectively reflect. Where are we standing now? How can we move forward? In an open dialogue with Vázquez, we can address some of our key findings and concerns.
Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam
22 November 2024
teaching
Graduation Design Studio:
Advanced Housing Design.
Ecologies of Inclusion
course coordinator: Olv Klijninstructor: 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-Tongco-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