Michael Smith Entre Nos Atelier Central / Spatial Justice Platform, Costa Rica
Statement
An architectural and urban design practice values the symbiosis of professional and academic endeavors. Balancing research projects, communal spaces, residences, and strategic planning, it fosters social impact. Collaboration with clients enriches insights, emphasizing participatory approaches. Each project aspires to cultivate tangible well-being, identity, and a sense of place, achieved through interdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement. Experimentation with local materials underscores the atelier’s commitment to sustainability. Operating in low-income or vulnerable communities, it prompts critical reflection on space, shelter, and communal living, fostering learning and emotional resonance. Designs emerge from technical expertise, intuition, collaboration, hope, awareness, and human solidarity. At this juncture a platform such as PLEA evolves around the tension between practice and academia, hence its role in pinpointing new bridges for exploration and research.
Michael Smith
Biography
Architect (2005) San Jose, Costa Rica, Master in Sustainable Environmental Design from the Architectural Association in London (2008), and Loeb Fellow at Harvard University (2019). He is the director of the Entre Nos Atelier Central and the Spatial Justice Platform. He is a professor and researcher at the University of Costa Rica, Veritas University, Tecnológico de Monterrey, and the University of Los Andes. His work has presented globally and received significant national and international awards, promoting participation, collaboration, spatial justice, and sustainability. The practice of Architect Michael Smith-Masis has developed between the hybridity of professional practice as an architect and as an academic. It can be described as a praxis of theory put into practice from professional and academic environments moving from a wide range of communal spaces, single-family, commercial and strategic planning; promoting prefabricated systems, local timber, participatory design among diverse scales and inform design processes from local and advanced technical criteria towards regenerative sustainable design.
Projects
- Cueva de Luz
- Casa del Arbol
- Las Gradas de Copey
Official Website
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