Alejandro Echeverri
Professor Alejandro Echeverri is an architect, urbanist, and Colombian academic. He is co-founder and director of URBAM, a center for urban and environmental studies at EAFIT University in Medellín, Colombia. He is Distinguished Visiting Professor in Urbanism at TEC Monterrey in Mexico and a Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) Loeb Fellow. Between 2004 and 2008 as Director of EDU The Urban Development Institute, and as the city’s director of urban projects of Medellín, he led the Social Urbanism strategy making the city a blueprint for the future for other distressed cities worldwide.
Echeverri has collaborated as a professor, lecturer, and jury member with various international institutions, and has been a design critic at the Harvard GSD. A lecturer at the LSE Cities Master program at the London School of Economics and Political Science, he has been a researcher and professor at LUB, Barcelona Urban Lab at the ETSAB, and in other academic centers and urban labs worldwide. Echeverri’s experience combines architecture, environmental urban planning processes, and social issues especially in countries with weak political and institutional structures.
Echeverri’s work has earned the Obayashi Prize 2016 in Japan, the 10th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design from Harvard GSD in 2013, the Curry Stone Design Prize in 2009, the Colombian National Architectural Award and the Pan-American Biennale in Urban Design, among others. He is a member of multiple international advisory boards of institutions and centers related to urban issues. Echeverri’s intellectual production includes publications and articles focused on architecture, urbanism, and environment, and he is active in design through his studio, which focuses on projects with low environmental impact for tropic regions.