Pedro Ignacio Alonso is Program Director of the AA Visiting School to Santiago and is a Visiting Professor at the ‘Histories and Critical Thinking’ MA Program. He currently teaches theory of architecture and design at the Catholic University in Santiago, investigating the design of industrial ecologies constrained by extreme weather conditions and scarce energy resources in the Atacama Desert.
Between 2006 and 2009 he worked at Arup Urban Design in London on a number of projects in Russia, Azerbaijan, China and Saudi Arabia. Alonso has been awarded with a Research Grant from The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (2010), and with a Fellowship as Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal (2011). He has also been awarded by the Prince Claus Fund in Amsterdam for the publication of Deserta, an ongoing study on the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.
Alonso holds a MSc in Architecture from the Catholic University in Chile and completed his Ph.D at the Architectural Association on the modernist conceptualization of architecture as a work of assemblage. Recent publications include Deserta: Ecology and Industry in the Atacama Desert (Santiago: ARQ, 2012); Cancha Deserta, in: Pilar Pinchart & Bernardo Valdés (eds.), “Catalogue of the Chilean Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012.” (Santiago: CNCA, 2012); and with Hugo Palmarola, A Panel’s Tale: The Soviet I-464 System and the Politics of Assemblage, in: Helen Gyger and Patricio Del Real (eds.), “Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories.” (New York: Routledge, 2012); and The Soviet KPD Building System in Cuba and Chile, 1963-1973, in: Franz Graf & Yvan Delemontey (eds.) “Understanding and Conserving Industrialised and Prefabricated Architecture” (Laussane: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2012).
Emerging Voices Lecture: Panel trajectories