Architect from Buenos Aires, Ciro Najle is Visiting Critic at Cornell University since 2005, and is the former Director of the Landscape Urbanism Graduate Design Program and Diploma Unit Master at the Architectural Association in London. He has previously taught at Columbia University, the Berlage Institute and the University of Buenos Aires. Director of GDB General Design Bureau and previously of MID, Met Infrastructural Domain. Young Architect of the Year second prize in 2001, he has practiced in Buenos Aires, New York and London since 1991 and has collaborated with RUR Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, with Keller Easterling and with Luis Ibarlucia. His work has been exhibited in various academic and cultural venues including the Prague Biennale of Art and at the Beijing Bienniale of Architecture 2004, where he was the curator of the London Pavilion. Publications include theoretical essays and projects published in Quaderns, After the Sprawl, Oris, Architectural World, Egg Magazine, Esquire, the introduction to the 2G FOA Monograph, the research, design and editing of ‘Tokyo Bay Experiment’ and the coediting of ‘Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape’ with Mohsen Mostafavi.
Throughout his professional and academic experience he has moved across several fields of investigation, in search for expanding the limits of the practice and exploring methods of collaboration with other fields of expertise. His interest in finding consistently creative models for design production in order to empower the design techniques and generative procedures of the discipline lead into systematic appropriations of cybernetic thinking into architecture, and to explorations on the abstraction and integration of material, structural, regulatory and typological constraints in the process of generation. His practice and design research focuses on the configuration of rigorous systems of mediation and management of restrictions as a means for the production of innovative architectural organizations. The scope of his work is concentrated in two general areas: building forms of expertise and methodologies to reconfigure traditional architectural typologies and formulate new ones, and the absorption of knowledge from structural, civil and environmental engineering as a way of merging architectural techniques and technologies. His teaching activity at the AAP moves across two fields: one that covers material exploration, prototype development and product design, and the other on emerging large-scale urban typologies in Latina America and Asia.
Curriculum Vitae (.pdf)
