Natalia Escobar Castrillon

Natalia Escobar Castrillón is a licensed architect and a professor of Architecture and Social Justice. She holds a PhD in Architecture and a Master in Design from Harvard University, as well as a Masters in Architecture from the University of Seville. Prior to Carleton, Escobar Castrillón taught graduate courses and advised master students at Harvard University, Boston University, Chile Catholic University, and São Paulo University. Prof. Escobar Castrillón’s research and teaching work addresses questions of spatial justice, social equity, collective identity, displacement, and representation in the built environment. Her publications unpack the complexities of contested buildings and sites worldwide, and discuss the role of design and narrative-making in supporting or silencing social groups. She has taught courses on these topics pursuing engagement practices with local communities.

She has been awarded grants from the Spanish Ministry of Education (TALENTIA), the Jorge Paulo Lemann Foundation, the David Rockefeller Foundation, the Harvard Asia Center, and the São Paulo Academic Research Foundation (FAPESP), among others, which allow her to pursue fieldwork in Europe, Latin America, and Asia where she studied the intersection of architecture with questions of power, gender, race, and social class through the work of architects Lu Wengyu and Wang Shu, and Lina Bo. More recently, Prof. Escobar was awarded a Carleton University International Research Seed Grant to produce visualizations of oppression and resilience of migrant populations in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank. This work been accepted for publication in the upcoming Routledge book Critical Companion to Race and Architecture.

Prof. Escobar Castrillón is also the founder of the architectural journal Oblique that received the AIA NY Center for Architecture Publications Award and aims to revise hegemonic design practices and discourses. She was also the invited editor of editions ARQ and of Materia Arquitectura issue 11 and recently published her reflections on Lina Bo’s alternative notion of modernity at N. Escobar, “Anthropophagic Phenomenology: Encounters at Lina Bo’s SESC Pompeia Cultural and Leisure Center,” in The New Urban Condition: Architecture and the City in the 21st Century, Eds. Tom Avermaete, Leandro Medrano, Luiz Recamán, New York: Routledge, 2021. 

## Education - Advanced Master in Critical Conservation (Distinction) Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2011 — 2013) - M.Arch, B.Arch Universidad de Sevilla (2003 — 2009) - Exchange Program Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Strasbourg (2006 — 2007)

Research

N. Escobar, C. Sepulveda, “Learning with Migrant Women: Academic Research as Social Activism,” The Routledge Companion to Race and Architecture, London: Routledge, (forthcoming 2022).

N. Escobar, “Dismantling Symbolic Violence: The Critical Conservation of Plantation Architecture,” RAIC-CCUSA 2021 Conference Proceedings, (forthcoming 2022).

N. Escobar, “Anthropophagic Phenomenology: Encounter at Lina Bo’s SESC Pompeia Cultural and Leisure Center,” in The New Urban Condition: Architecture and the City in the 21st Century, Eds. Tom Avermaete, Leandro Medrano, Luiz Recamán, New York: Routledge, 2021.

S. Domínguez, Angela R., J. Fernández, N. Escobar, “Architecture of the Scape: Thermal Assessment of Refugee Shelter Design in the Extremes Climates of Jordan, Afghanistan and South Sudan,” Journal of Building Engineering (Q1), Vol. 42, 2021.

N. Escobar, “From Ideology to Ontology,” in Ediciones ARQ Michael Hays, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago (2017).

N. Escobar, “Interview with David Chipperfield: Architecture is Never Dead” in Materia Arquitectura: Conservation as an Expanded Field, no. 11 (2015). Indexed journal: Avery Index, Latindex, ARLA.

Founding Ed. N. Escobar, Oblique, A Journal on Critical Conservation, 2016-present (Recipient of the 2017 Haskell Fellowship from the AYA New York Center for Architecture)

Ed. N. Escobar, Materia Arquitectura Journal: Conservation as an Expanded Field, no. 11 (2015), Universidad de San Sebastián, Chile. (Bilingual) Indexed journal: Avery Index, Latindex, ARLA,Web of Science Emerging Sources CitationIndex (ESCI), EBSCO