Yuri Leonardo Works

How I work

Yuri Leonardo Works is an Operations Architecture practice: I design the operating floor plan of a business — its processes, its tools and the way a team uses them — with the discipline of an architectural project. What brings order to a building brings order to a company. That discipline comes from more than twenty years of project and design work at every scale, from furniture to territory, and from a body of work in architecture and art made with the same method. Based in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; working remotely in English, Spanish and French, with systems and documentation delivered in your team's language.

The method

The work starts from the same operation in any domain: read the logic of a situation — a business, a place, an image — propose a different way of doing it, and build the system that supports it. How I do that is itself a method, and I wrote it down: I call it the Pyramid Method. In consulting it lands as four phases: diagnosis, process design, tool building, adoption and measurement.

Design and construction are two different processes, and construction is always subordinate to design: design while you build and you undo with your feet what you made with your hands. That is the single biggest reason a project piles up hours and drifts away from what it was for — the time goes into fixing things that were only built wrong because nobody drew the lines first.

A project opens with a single root concept and the product it has to deliver, declared at the same moment, so there is a fixed point of arrival rather than branches of thinking with nothing concrete at the end of them. From each concept no more than three follow, and between one line and the next comes a moment of verification — not of building. What it produces is a map rather than a document: when something in the finished thing fails, you go to the node that caused it, correct it there and rebuild from that point, instead of patching the object. It is built for speed, not ceremony. I design things to be used and tested in the real world.

A process also has to be designed against the way people really behave under pressure: the system fixes the order of the work in advance, so that under load the loudest request does not silently become the most important one. That is also why adoption is a phase of the work and not a hand-over: a system is not finished when it works. It is finished when the team uses it.

Why the trades change and the method does not

What has moved me from one field to another has never been opportunity. It has been the pull of problems I did not yet know how to solve. I have never treated a new field as starting from scratch — I have treated it as an intellectual problem, and I have solved each one the same way. My strength has never been that I am a good architect, or artist, or cabinetmaker, or cook. It is that I can look at a situation head-on, identify the problem, and work out how to build the answer to it. A sculpture never sent me to sculpture school; it sent me to find out how to make it. Operations architecture is the same move, applied to what I now find most interesting: what a business can become with the tools available today.

That move is not a personal knack. It is what I was trained to do. My postgraduate research diploma at the ETSAB in Barcelona was in the criticism and analysis of the project: taking somebody else's finished work, cutting it into its essential parts, reconstructing the design process that produced it — and then being able to explain it, reproduce it and teach it. Read outside architecture, that is the consultant's core skill: you are handed something already built, by someone else, and you have to understand how it came to be that way before you can say anything useful about changing it. A business is a finished work in exactly that sense. That training is also where the Pyramid Method comes from: the same operation run in reverse, to build rather than to read.

Making an operation work without depending on one person

I am the external architect for a finishes retailer in Santo Domingo, where I have surveyed and am redesigning the processes that run the business — from first contact with a client through to payment — and have built seventeen in-house applications that support them, progressively replacing the legacy system. The full sales cycle, from first client contact through to payment, could once be run end to end by only three people; today any of the sales team runs it. Beyond that retailer, two commissions are in build today: an administration system for a rental-property portfolio in Puerto Rico, and the operating platform of a supplements laboratory — both past the diagnosis stage and now in design and construction. Earlier, in 2020–2021, the production protocols and quality standards of a furniture factory in Punta Cana, as its production manager.

I also build and run software of my own. One is a private application for families, in daily use by households in the Dominican Republic, France, Germany and Puerto Rico, which I have kept redesigning around what its users actually asked for — the same adoption discipline I sell, applied where I cannot hide behind a contract. I am currently designing a second: Space Designer, a program for designing spaces, starting with kitchens, fitted wardrobes and bathrooms.

Directing projects at every scale

Design advisor and coastal-infrastructure project coordinator at the Dominican Republic's Ministry of Tourism (2021–2023), responsible for the technical and design standards of territorial-scale projects. Before that, three years at the practice of AUA Paul Chemetov in Paris (2008–2011) — project architect, then project manager — on housing, public infrastructure and education, from urban master plans down to the single building. My stage covered concept, project and site supervision; none of them was finished when I left the practice. And four years at Estudi Alfa Arquitectes in Barcelona (2004–2008) — social housing, single-family houses, public infrastructure projects — where I started as a project architect and left as a project manager, taking projects from start to finish.

Running operations, not only designing them

None of this is a detour into food. From 2023 to 2025 I ran LARCA, a pop-up cook-to-order kitchen in Santo Domingo, as chef and owner. And I was made manager of The Klub Kitchen in Berlin for what I could do outside the kitchen — inventory, purchasing, catering logistics and profitability, in a restaurant serving more than four hundred dishes a day (November 2018 – June 2020). That is business management, and it is the same capability I am hired for now: an operation is an operation, whatever it produces. Earlier, in Berlin, I founded and designed Lar Bags, a line of city bags made in direct collaboration with Dominican artisans.

Writing, lecturing, teaching

I have lectured since 2008 and published essays since 2010. Among them my essay About Galerías: an Extinct Species in the Dominican Spatial Fauna (2014), written for Tropical Ghosts Project, a work commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; and, in 2018, the lecture Primitive Being in the c.XXII: Migration · LGBTQ · Artificial Intelligence at UNPHU — I was lecturing on artificial intelligence in 2018. Between 2021 and December 2025 I taught design studio and theory and criticism of art and architecture, at UNPHU and PUCMM concurrently. I returned to teaching in September 2026 and currently hold the Proyecto VI design studio at PUCMM.

And a body of work of my own

Two things here, and they are not the same. In 2018 Michael Sailstorfer engaged me as a freelance designer to work on his own exhibitions of that period: their exhibition design and selection of works, and some of the sculptures shown in them — the full-scale originals, in cardboard and tape, cast and finished by subcontractors. My own work is a separate thing, and it is ongoing: drawing, collage and sculpture since 2011. The drawings and collages of 2011–2014 were shown in the first of my three solo exhibitions, O Tender Fellows, at the Centro Cultural de España in Santo Domingo (2014). The other two are Monsters – Working on Absence (The Corridor, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, 2016, curated by Corinne Loisel) and Ausentes (Centro Cultural de España, 2017). Separately: nine months as a resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Prisoners, a fifty-four-metre installation in the OFF Program of Dak'Art, the 2016 Dakar Biennale — commissioned by IFAA and curated by Sithabile Mlotshwa. It has been exhibited in France, Germany, Senegal, Lithuania and the Dominican Republic. The exhibitions start in 2014 and the work has been continuous since — commissions, exhibitions and projects, to this day.

Employment has never interrupted the independent practice: since 2003 the two have run in parallel. I work from Santo Domingo, in Spanish, English and French.

Education

• Advanced Studies Diploma (DEA) in Project Criticism and Analysis — ETSAB, Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona · 2005–2008
• Master's in Architectural Design — ETSAB, Barcelona · 2004–2005
• Architect — UNPHU, Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Santo Domingo · 1998–2003 (graduation thesis Una Propuesta para Habitar, which won an award at the 2006 edition of the Santo Domingo International Architecture Biennial)
• Cabinetmaking Diploma (CAP), furniture design and making — École Boulle, Paris · 2014–2015