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CIUDADLAB is a nonprofit research, design and action driven collective about the city. It was founded in 2004 in San Juan, Puerto Rico by Marcelo López Dinardi and Oscar Oliver Didier as an initiative to investigate the complexities inherent to the contemporary cityscape. CIUDADLAB addresses the modes and the representations that daily impact and inform our customs, identities and desires that are so greatly impregnated into our built environments. Today, more than ever, it is essential that architecture gets nurtured from other disciplines in order to study the complexities of the contemporary city’s territories, its complex nature is not of its exclusive dominion, much less the problematics that imply to ponder it.

Since 2005 it has collaborated with ArqPoli, the School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, where it occasionally offers an annual course of the same name. CIUDADLAB maintains as well a blog and develops workshops with local and foreign collaborators.

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Marcelo López Dinardi

Studied his first year of architecture in the city of Valparaíso in his natal Chile, and in 2004 obtained his Bachelor in Architecture from the School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, Cum Laude. Is co-founder of the collective CIUDADLAB. He is instructor (on leave) of design studio, research and representation in ArqPoli, where he as well directed and organized the 2009-2010 Lectures Series Sense Recession: What Comes Next?. At ArqPoli he also directed the Roundtable Series for four years to address critically the implications of contemporary architectural practices and since 2009 is co-editor of ArqPoli’s journal Polimorfo, which he also co-founded. From 1999 to present, has collaborated in various architectural firms in Puerto Rico, obtaining various awards for the work realized, he’s now searching for independent work through research and alternatives practices in architecture. He is currently a 2013 candidate to the Master in Science in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture of Columbia University in New York City.

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Oscar Oliver Didier

Architect, Urban Designer and Instructor at ArqPoli School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico where he teaches design studio, a course on Histories and Theories of the Neo-Avant-Gardes and where he recently directed the 2008 lecture series entitled: “Revisiting the Rhetorical Masters of the Architectural Neo-Avant-Garde”. He is currently the Co-editor of the journal Polimorfo, a multidisciplinary publication on architecture and its multiple cultural roles. Prior to that, his interest for the everyday repercussions of contemporary urbanism led him to be one of the editors of Onourb Magazine (2001-2004) and Co-creator and Co-principal of CIUDADLAB. He was a former urban policy maker and advisor to the Governor of Puerto Rico and holds a Masters in Urban Design from Harvard University and a Bachelors from ArqPoli School of Architecture.