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Juan Grisales is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Environmental Design program at University of Colorado Boulder. Juan is a versatile transdisciplinary designer and researcher with studies in architecture, landscape architecture, ecology, and urbanism.

His work focuses predominantly on design research methods to read, decode and project misinterpreted, misrepresented and often marginalized domains (territories, ecologies and publics), their evolving processes, as well as their relation to their larger bio-physical geography. In this process, he examines core-periphery dynamics that can be found at multiple spatial and temporal scales to generate new narratives and ways to deconstruct and reconceptualize imposed definitions on the built and non-built environment.

Some topics related to his work include informality, migration, hinterlands, abandonment, emergent ecologies, intermediate cities (vis-à-vis global/megacities), and tropicality (vis-à-vis temperate latitudes). He is interested in how the juxtaposition, confrontation, negotiation, and hybridity of these elements can inform the emergence of novel practices and programmatic uses that have to be invented (or re-invented), going beyond the standardization of conventional typologies.

Juan received his bachelor’s in architecture from Cornell University and a dual master’s degree in landscape architecture and design studies from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was the recipient of the 2021 Design Studies Thesis Prize for his work titled From Humboldt to Caldas: Environmental Liberations through Tropical Altitudes. The project focuses on territorial postcolonial legacies and challenges the Eurocentric-cartographic way of thinking about the earth by formulating multi-scalar concepts and correlations to illustrate the multiplicity of tropical conditions and how they deviate significantly from Western misperceptions of the environment.

Juan has previously taught at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Universidad Catolica de Pereira and he has been able to advance his research through various grants and fellowships focusing primarily on tropical environments in both Latin America and Southeast Asia.