Advanced Architectural Design program, Columbia GSAPP
Valeria Ramirez is a Colombian architect who grew up in the country’s coffee growing region, an early proximity to landscape and material that continues to shape how she approaches architecture. She recently completed the Advanced Architectural Design program at Columbia GSAPP, where she received the William Ware Prize and served as a teaching and research associate. Over the past five years, she has worked across Latin America, Europe, and North America, at a range of scales and project types, an experience that has shaped her interest in the intersections between architecture, research, and material experimentation.
In recent years, her work has moved between design and construction, using installations and temporary structures to test ideas directly through making, use, and time. She continues to research and explore these ideas through community-based workshops in New York City parks exploring ecological restoration and the coexistence of human and non-human life, and through her participation on the team leading an edition of PATIO Magazine, a student-led publication exploring architecture, culture, and cosmologies from Latin American perspectives.
Ramirez is interested in how architecture can reveal overlooked relationships between people, landscapes, food systems, and the many forms of life that shape them, creating spaces and experiences that invite reflection, interaction, and new ways of relating to the environment.
