Professor and Director, Architecture
Faculty Fellow
- PhD, Princeton University, History and Theory, Department of Architecture
- MS, Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Columbia University, in Advanced Architectural Design (with Honors)
- AA Diploma, Architectural Association, London
Daniel López-Pérez (b. Madrid, 1973) is a Professor of Architecture and a founding faculty member of the Architecture Program at the University of San Diego.
López-Pérez’s scholarship focuses on the historiography of modern architecture and its relationship to contemporary questions of technology, design-research, design-pedagogy, material, and environmental culture. He is the recipient of numerous research grants and awards including from the Spanish Ministry of Culture (ACE), Mexico’s National Council for Culture and Arts (CONACULTA), Princeton University’s Barr Ferree Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and two Faculty Research Mentor Awards from the University of San Diego.
López-Pérez’s work and writings have been widely presented at institutions that include the Venice Biennale; Princeton University; Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; Stanford University Libraries; Cal-Poly in San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles; University of Southern California; University of Wisconsin, Madison; Penn State; MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab; the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal; the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; the Architectural Association, London; Bochum University of Applied Sciences; Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar; Aalto University in Jyvaskyla, Finland; Bezalel Academy of arts and Design in Jerusalem; Universidad Tortuaco Di Tella, Buenos Aires; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Tec de Monterrey, Campus Guadalajara; and the National University of Busan in South Korea.
Professional Experience
In professional practice, López-Pérez is the founder of www.polyhaus.com : a patent-pending model for rapid-housing, that brings together the environmental resilience of mass-timber with the advancements of its digital fabrication and fast assembly, to address the nation’s housing crisis.
More information available at www.transversalgroup.com
Scholarly Work
Made possible in part by a Barr Ferree Foundation Fund awarded by the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University, López-Pérez is the author of R. Buckminster Fuller, Pattern-Thinking (Lars Muller Publishers, Zurich, 2020). Pattern-Thinking reassesses the work of R. Buckminster Fuller—unique hybrid between theoretician, architect, designer, educator, inventor, and author—as advancing contemporary models of design research, practice, and pedagogy. Drawing extensively on Fuller’s archive, the book follows his unique process of translation between the physical and conceptual dimensions of design, to redefine our understanding of the relationships between geometry, structure, language, and intellectual property. Pattern-Thinking is on the critic’s list of “2021 Best Art Books” of the LA Times, and is currently on its second edition.
An official entry to the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale and funded in part by a Spanish Ministry of Culture Award - Acción Cultural Española (ACE); López-Pérez curated Geoscope 2: Worlds, an immersive, inflatable, multimedia split-sphere occupied by the public. Presenting the work of architecture students, theorists, and practitioners, Geoscope 2 offers a kaleidoscope of contemporary thoughts and visions at the planetary scale—from the widest reaches of the discipline—and responds to the current tsunami of upheavals within our global society and the natural world.
Areas of Interest
López-Pérez’s instruction spans across Architectural Design Studios and History and Theory Seminars. The research in the Architectural Design Studios combines digital processes with new methods of material fabrication that focus on issues of materiality in the broader sense, such as typology, systems, structure, program, and larger scale questions surrounding infrastructure and the urban environment. The History and Theory Seminars range from lower to upper-division, and most recently have included an upper-division seminar on Theories of Organicism: an examination of discourses surrounding the themes of “Organicism” in the 19th Century, and “Organic Architecture” in the 20th Century, as productive constructs from which to gain a deeper understanding of the development of modern architecture.
López-Pérez has taught design studios at Princeton University, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.