César A. Lopez

Education

California College of the Arts, Master of Architecture
Texas Tech University, College of Architecture, El Paso, Bachelor of Science in Architecture

Biography

César A. Lopez is a first-generation Mexican American architectural designer, researcher, and educator who draws on his upbringing in the Mexico-United States Border Region as critical knowledge to explore the entanglements between architecture, territory, and the politics that dictate them. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. He co-directs FRONTERA-NATION with Germán Pallares-Avitia, a design, research, and advocacy practice that re-frames political borders as a constellation of sites and identities.
 
As an educator, César embraces his experiences as a first-generation college graduate to explore grounded pedagogical approaches in teaching core and research-based design studios, visualization courses, and seminars on the politics of representation. In 2023, he received the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) / American Institute of Architectural Students (AIAS) New Faculty Teaching Award by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. In 2024, César was appointed to serve on the 2024-2025 ACSA Leadership Committee.
 
As a design researcher, César has presented at national and international conferences and symposiums and published in prominent journals. He is co-authoring a book titled Exclusions, Edges, and Ecologies: An Architecture… which documents the infrastructural and architectural typologies along political boundaries to identify the entanglement between architecture and power structures. In 2024, César exhibited Public Domestic with Gabriel Fries-Briggs, which investigates how mutual aid and improvised interventions have reformatted domestic spaces throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on populations in the American Southwest. This project was awarded the 2024 Jeff Harnar Award for Unbuilt Architecture. Most recently, he was selected as a 2024-25 University Design Research Fellow and will participate in the fifth cycle of Exhibit Columbus in the summer of 2025.
 
In 2023, César was awarded the Arnold W. Brunner/Frances Barker Tracy/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize in Architecture by the American Academy in Rome. While in residence, he began a multi-year project called Citizenry Actions, which will draw the parallels between the early expansion of the Roman Empire and the evolution of the Mexico-United States border to investigate how each constructed a national identity and body. To culminate his time in Rome, he exhibited the first phase of this project with a series of tactile drawings called Borderlands Lens, which visualizes the latent boundaries and enclosures that shape the identities of border subjects. 
 
Until 2022, César was the Associate at The Open Workshop, where he was a designer and the Representation Lead in several national and internationally recognized projects, such as New Investigations in Collective Form (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2018), which was awarded the 2021 ACSA Faculty Design Award, Commoning Domestic Space (2021 Venice Architecture Biennale), and The Bronzeville Action Coalition (2021 Chicago Architecture Biennale), which was awarded the 2023 ACSA Faculty Design Honorable Mention Award.
 
Before joining the UVA A-School, César was an Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico SA+P. He also served as the JHP Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington CAPPA and was on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley CED, the California College of the Arts Architecture Division, and the Academy of Art University SoA.