Yuri Leonardo Works

Space Designer is a design and sales programme that takes a space from the interior to the module and its site. For kitchens, closets and bathrooms, it lets a salesperson with basic product knowledge produce a complete, priced proposal without an expert; for a prefabricated pavilion, it structures the module, its support kit, water, energy and service core, and switches the same model between forest and coast.

It designs from nothing or from an existing SketchUp model, and from one project source it produces the quotation, the layout and installation drawings, the factory breakdown, the product list and render briefs anchored to the model: client documents and workshop documents that never contradict each other. A missing figure is flagged, never guessed. In use on commissions since August 2026; a delivered closet commission was reproduced 14 of 14 plans identical, its price list to the cent.

Site Control, in development, guides, records and centralises every process of a construction site, from construction drawings to handover, so that the whole team works from the same data and the program guards against the human errors that a large volume of information and long processes produce. It reads the formats a site already uses: BC3, BCF, BVBS, CSV, IFC, Presto, Project and XLSX.

It is written to prevent paying for work covered without being checked and, at the next stage, the pour itself until it is released; when a new version or a contradiction appears, it reopens what was already signed off. Every record is linked to its place in the model, every act needs the authority of its role, and each company configures its catalogue, roles and users. On a test project, 53 of 53 end-to-end checks pass (measured on 7 October 2026).

A private web space for families whose members live in different countries: a daily log, a map of journeys whose stops link to their days, albums, one profile per member. The design threshold was written in one line: if the youngest member or a grandparent cannot publish alone from a phone in under a minute, it is badly designed.

Each entry is signed by its author, written in the author's own language, Spanish, French or German, and translated automatically into the other two. One code base serves every family, each isolated from every other in the database. There are no likes and no metrics, and nothing can be indexed. In production since July 2026, it is in daily use by five families in the Dominican Republic, France, Germany and Puerto Rico.

The Construction Documents Engine turns a 3D model into the documents a site and a workshop work from: quantity tables room by room, shop sheets with every dimension read from the model, dimensioned isometric sheets, fabrication sheets and quotation dossiers per trade. Every bar is cut to length and board usage is optimised room by room. A figure without a source blocks the issue, and a test rejects the document if any element appears without its supports. Each project is a configuration of one engine.

For the suspended ceilings of a school under construction, 451 sheets were delivered on 28 September 2026, at revision 17, room by room and detail by detail, with every hanger rod billed in the tables drawn where it goes; sets of 128 and 254 sheets had been delivered on 21 and 25 September. In 2026 it was used on five commissions.

The Operations Platform carries the operations of an organisation, sales, clients, projects, collections, inventory, contracts, fees, into its own app and intranet, designed for how that organisation works. The operation is mapped before anything is built. Each piece of data is entered once and appears wherever it is needed; status is calculated, never typed; every missing figure appears as a declared gap, exported to whoever must supply it. Permissions are enforced in the database, not hidden in the screen.

At a construction-finishes retailer, a sales cycle that only three people could run end to end can now be run by any member of the sales team, on seventeen in-house applications, from first contact to payment. YLW runs on it too: the practice's own registry of every project, from the first lead to the last invoice.

A villa in Punta Cana, on a golf course, needed repairs before going onto short-stay platforms: paint, leaks, electrical work. The brief set a target guest and asked for a durable fit-out with low maintenance, and for professional photographs that would show the qualities of the space, the fairway as well as the house. The works were completed in 2026; the photographs are by Moisés De Jesús.

Its expense record, payment by payment, later served as an approximate measure of suppliers' real lead times, and went into the works programme of a house remodelling in Santo Domingo.

A house in Santo Domingo, in very good condition, being adapted for rental to executives and families, groups of six to ten guests. The first works, planned as minor repairs, were in fact the demolition of a gazebo and the construction of a platform for a spa: the design starts from what was actually built, not from what was planned.

The existing house was modelled exactly as it stands and read by script with my Construction Documents Engine, verified independently; the quotation dossiers by trade take every dimension from the model. The works programme draws on suppliers' lead times measured, payment by payment, at a holiday villa. The spa is now to be moved, and the current stage is the garden around it.

A line of urban bags in three models, for a Berlin brand I founded. My text for the project opens with a scene in Paris: a man on a bike, an empty shoulder bag folded around his body like a jacket. The response is a large bag that goes completely flat when empty, sized for a whole day of working tools: one 500 × 200 mm body in three heights, 600, 500 and 400 mm, in leather and waterproof canvas.

The making was part of the project. The design was broken down into parts so that it could be made without the designer in the room, by a saddler, Adolfo Fariña, and Dominican artisans, bringing the quality of their craft to international markets. The bags were produced on commission.

Master-plan competition, 2013, for a new city in Santo Domingo, in which we were finalists; project architect, with Juan Mubarak as project director. The site's perimeter is formed by a series of peripheral elements that press its limits toward the geometric centre; the result is a polygon whose vertices act as doors to the rest of the city and to the interior of the country. The inner structure of the plan is traced by connecting those doors, and a wind study orients the blocks.

The plan is based on a system in which every element can hold several complementary positions at once: keeping its functioning coherent with the development of its context, and constantly regenerating itself to adapt to future territorial realities, so guaranteeing the city's continuity in time.

Commissioned study, 2013, for 240 apartments in Santo Domingo, for Shearly Investment Group; architect-in-charge, with Juan Mubarak as project director. The site has a difficult shape and is bounded on three of its four sides by an avenue and two streets.

The problem was to distribute the 240 apartments so that they answer their urban situation, relate to the low-density buildings around them and, at the same time, hold a structured dialogue with the interior of the site. The project opens a series of triangular open-air pockets, each giving a different scale and identity to its part of the courtyard: the diversity of scale around the site, read as a map, carried inside.

Study, 2012–2013, for a new Dominican–Haitian border region; architect-in-charge, with Shaney Peña Gómez as associate architect. A border is not a line: it is a region. The line read as the border is a graphic representation of one aspect of a larger reality, the centre of a region more complex than a political symbol.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic develop outward from their capitals, which leaves the border as the furthest point of each country and penalises its growth. Starting from the real region, a quarter of the island, a series of maps identifies the infrastructure that would give it economic and political autonomy in proportion to its size and, in a second phase, a supranational connection. It follows Cartography of an Object (UNPHU, 2008), a workshop on the same border.

Commissioned study, 2011–2012, for a national museum devoted to the lifework of the Dominican scientist Eugenio de Jesús Marcano, on a site within the Botanical Garden of Santo Domingo; architect-in-charge, with Shaney Peña Gómez as associate architect. If there is one place where a project must not fell trees, it is a botanical garden: the map of the 107 trees already on the site gave the museum its ideal space, and every one of them is kept.

The model came from criticism: my 2010 essay on the Ideal Museum, read from Semper's spiral to Wright's Guggenheim. Taken to the site, it became a horizontal spiral that guides visitors through the exhibition around three courtyards while they stay in contact with the vegetation. The north side opens entirely to the garden; the south façade is a long vertical garden that filters the Caribbean sun.

Competition entry, 2007, for a 2050 vision of the Greater Helsinki region, as architect-in-charge with the architects Laura Barbieri and Eugenio Mangi. The region sits on a transversal axis, from western Uusimaa to the Russian border, that splits at Helsinki into two national routes; it had grown radially from the city, losing importance and density as it moved away.

To reduce that dispersion, the proposal sews the two routes together with two axes, two different ways of connecting Mäntsälä and Helsinki. Superposed, they draw a possible relation between the scales of data exchange, global, national and regional, and those of territory. The municipalities form a ring, which allows significant natural areas to be drawn inside it. The plan was built as a plexiglas model.

Graduation thesis at UNPHU, Santo Domingo, 2003, with Juan Mubarak and Giovanni Pérez Linval as advisors, awarded at the 2006 edition of the Santo Domingo International Architecture Biennial. The problem it set itself was the Dominican dwelling: how to move from the minimal traditional unit to a coherent residential space for the modern Dominican individual.

Through a group of essays turned into exercises, the thesis proposed a dwelling that takes into its core the temporality of present-day life and the cycles that define its needs. Its module is the Portable House. The Dominican dwelling returns eleven years later, in my essay About Galerías (2014), as the loss of the gallery.

The module of my thesis A Proposal to Inhabit: a prefabricated module, able to settle into any natural setting, with one kit for each site. Designed in 2003 and studied for a private client in 2012, as architect-in-charge.

Its study model, 50 × 30 × 15 cm, is built in plexiglas and tape, and was awarded at the 2006 edition of the Santo Domingo International Architecture Biennial as part of the thesis. Two collages set the module on a beach and in the mountains.

An outdoor sculpture for Paris by the Cameroonian artist Malam, commissioned by La Maison de l'Agriculture for the Cité Universitaire and set to be built in the summer of 2025: a column 400 × 60 cm in cast resin and Corten steel. The work is Malam's. My role was technical consultant on the construction and the permanence of the column on site.

The project was suspended, and the sculpture was not installed. The collaboration did not begin there: in February and March 2016 I worked in Malam's studio at the Cité internationale des arts.

A sculpture for the front of a jewellery shop, and my first major commission as a sculptor in the Dominican Republic. It uses the method I created for Rialengo No.3: each layer drawn one by one, between two others. Here the drawing became 480 profiles, 240 for each half, CNC-cut in 10 mm MDF, screwed one to the next and finished in automotive paint.

The layer is about 8.3 times thicker than in Rialengo No.3, so the sculpture grew in proportion to keep its detail. Drawn as two halves of 2.4 m, 4.8 m in all, it was built at 5 m: screwing, gluing and the minimum gap between layers add length, and the design allows for it.

In 2018 Michael Sailstorfer engaged me as a freelance designer. I designed and built a series of sculptures for several of his exhibitions of that period: the full-scale originals, in corrugated cardboard and tape, from which subcontractors produced the casts and the hyper-realist finish. I also worked with him on the exhibition design and the selection of works for those shows, which are his.

The way I used the tape gave the pieces their expression. Michael Sailstorfer saw that it should not be lost in the casting, and the final bronzes were painted hyper-realistically, to show exactly what I had built. My workbook records the full-scale casting models made for Brainspotting, Avlskarl Gallery, Copenhagen, 2018.

Twenty-four veils of one person, drawn and redrawn from memory over four years, each a different way of remembering the same individual. As the face disappears, the subject loses gender, race and age and becomes 'the memory of everything else reflected on the portrait of one specific individual'.

I call the veils informal cartographies, the term of my maps of territory. A first phase of twelve drawings in ink and graphite on paper, up to 300 × 300 cm, remains in study development. Two of the studies became Part in Style; FAR carries them to 122 × 180 cm.

Two drawings, 360 × 240 cm each, in ink, graphite and polyurethane on wood, commissioned by the Cultural Center of Spain in Santo Domingo and shown in my solo exhibition Ausentes (2017), curated by Cristina Rico. They come from Beloved Veils: two of its twenty-four studies became this project.

The text asks what happens when someone is forced to leave a country and start again elsewhere: memory and history, it says, stop being unconscious and become 'conscious and tangible bodies'. A second phase is in study development.

Twenty-six portraits in pastel, charcoal and graphite, drawn at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris, in the months after the attacks of November 2015; commissioned by IFAA, curated by Sithabile Mlotshwa, and shown in Monsters (Paris, 2016) and Ausentes (Santo Domingo, 2017).

If the attacks stirred patriotism and nationalism among the local-born, what did they stir among immigrants? I drew anonymous people rather than the known victims, keeping a distance that lets the viewer imagine the person could be oneself, a friend, a relative. Pastel works against the immediacy of the realistic portrait: the figure stays behind a blur, and the drawing carries a memory more than a likeness.

The brief was to map the historic sector of La Medina, in Dakar. The response was a series of informal maps, traced, in my word written, in nails, string and spray, from the view of a first-time visitor: a red installation fifty-four metres long.

It was commissioned by IFAA, curated by Sithabile Mlotshwa, and shown in the OFF Program of Dak'Art 2016. Its central sentence, informal maps as a way to recognise a territory and to pass tradition on, returns almost word for word in my texts of 2018 and 2025.

A block of wood drawn layer by layer, never more than two at a time. A single volume of four hundred 1.2 mm oak layers, each drawn one by one, laser-cut by MQ Creative Lab and screwed one to the next, is split lengthwise into three to uncover its core: four pieces, each of four hundred layers. The core reads as a traditional sculpture and stands on legs that are not part of the layered volume; the three outer pieces are its moulds, what carving usually throws away, kept and shown.

Rialengo is the Dominican word for the animals that live in the street. It is one of my first works on absence: the void, made visible. The work was shown in two formats: the sculpture, in All Inclusive during Berlin Art Week 2015, and the drawing, printed in fifteen sections, at Art Vilnius '16. Those fifteen sections now form the animation on the home page of this site, and the sculpture, mirrored — as one side grows, the other disappears, and the other way round — is the mark of Yuri Leonardo Works.

Eight pencil drawings and fourteen collages on two Dominican questions: the sale of the land at Bahía de las Águilas, and the relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Solo exhibition at the Sala María Ugarte of the Cultural Center of Spain in Santo Domingo, February–March 2014, curated by Cristina Rico. The title is a line from Allen Ginsberg's Wichita Vortex Sutra.

In my statement, the way the pieces are built seeks the universal side of two local themes: the figures are transformed until they exceed any notion of race and origin, individuals from neither here nor there. The migrant returns as the subject of later work: On Absence (2016) and '15562' (2025).

One beloved person, drawn and redrawn from memory over and over again: almost forty studies since a first phase in 2014–2017, and a current phase begun in 2024, in acrylic, ink, graphite and polyurethane on wood. They are the same studies as Beloved Veils, on a format of 122 × 180 cm.

Each study answers a different need and is a different way of remembering the same individual. The question behind it is what migration does to memory, which I frame as 'the multiple lives (and deaths) of a single individual during his/hers own migratory movements'. It is ongoing.