Born and raised in Valencia, Alejandro Campos is a historian, researcher, and educator of the built environment. His research and teaching address the intersection of modernity and coloniality, specialising in postwar modern architecture and the colonial dynamics behind its universalising claims.

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. (with summa cum laude) 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 publications consolidate him as a world-leading 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, and he is 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.