About

Luis Diaz was co-founder of the research-based practice, Brooklyn Architects Collective which carried out urban design research for the New York Municipal Arts Society and the Greenpoint/Williamsburg Waterfront Coalition. In 1998 the practice was a selected prize winner, receiving a certificate of merit, for their proposal for the Brooklyn Waterfront in the Van Alen Institute East River Competition. In addition, the practice carried out small residential and commercial design projects. These two disparate practices (research and design) and scales (urban and domestic) led to an interest in research focusing on small scale everyday practices and their spaces as a generator of both programs and proposals. Luis Diaz’s area of research is in the interrelationship between spatial practices and spatial forms. An inquiry into theories of the everyday in the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau and their use in architectural analyses is explored in tandem with linguistic theories (structuralism, semiotics, speech-act theory). This culminated in an MPhil using a series of housing estates in London built during the 1960s and 1970s as case studies. He received a BArch from the New York Institute of Technology in 1990 and spent the next ten years in a combination of practice, teaching and research. In addition he has studied at the Berlage Institute (design), the Bartlett (MSc History of Modern Architecture), The New School for Social Research (semiotics) and the London School of Economics (MPhil/PhD study) and at the University of Brighton (MPhil).
Luis Diaz has taught design and computer aided drawing at the New York Institute of Technology. In 2000 he relocated to the UK to study at the London School of Economics with Richard Sennett and later at the University of Brighton. He has taught history and theory at the Kent Institute of Art and Design and is now a Senior Lecturer and course leader for the BA(Hons) Architecture Course at the University of Brighton.