Tomas Folch

Architect and Master of Architecture of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, and Landscape Architect of Harvard University. He is currently a professor and Co-Director of the Center for Ecology, Landscape and Urbanism –CEPU- of the Design Lab of the Adolfo Ibañez University in Santiago.

Through the applied research at the CEPU, he has been working at multiple scales from territorial planning to informal settlements. Recently, he has been working for the Andes Mountain Strategic Plan, a sustainable development for a territory of 250,000 acres in the metropolitan region with public and private stakeholders, and continues working in the Ecology of the Informal, a research agenda together with the UrbanLab of the Inter-American Development Bank, that has been focused in the Barrio 31, Buenos Aires, the largest informal settlement of Latin America.

Trained as an architect, his professional work has expanded the scales of architecture, urban design, and landscape, throughout a professional experience with production on heritage and urban recovery projects, housing and social equipment, landscape architecture, as well as private projects. He is director and co-founder with Sofia Armanet of Paisaje Urbano -PAUR- where their work has been oriented in design for public space with a portfolio of projects including the Peñalolen Oriente Park on a site that used to have the largest informal settlement in Chile.

His work has been recognized in the 2006 Architecture Biennial of Chile in the category of emerging generation, National Exhibition Award in the Architecture Biennial of Santiago 2008, South-South Professional Award of the XX Architecture Biennial of Chile 2017 for being the proposal more effective in establishing a horizontal dialogue with the geographies of the global south, and the PAU 2017 Urban Contribution Award in the categories of Best Height Building Project and Best Urban Project for Subsidized Housing.