I analyse a model, a precedent or an operation critically before I design, and then test it against the real conditions of your site or business: a research-led method I teach today in the Proyecto VI design studio at PUCMM.
← Yuri Leonardo WorksProcess 09 of ten
From analysis to project
Germinating since 2003, in A Proposal to Inhabit Applied in 2 works, 2003–2011
A model studied in criticism is tested against the real condition of a site. My practice is research-led: every project starts with a question, and the analysis comes before the drawing.
“If there is one place where a project must not fell trees, it is a botanical garden.”
The research question
How do you build the Ideal Museum on a site whose trees cannot be touched?
I Essays into exercises · 2003
The habit is older than any degree. My graduation thesis, in 2003, already turned a group of essays into exercises: how the Dominican dwelling could move from the minimal traditional unit to a coherent residential space.
II A discipline I chose · 2004–2008
“The DEA is a tool, but one I chose. I could have chosen a programme in structures or sustainability; I chose Criticism and Analysis, not by chance, but because it was what I really wanted to develop.”
In Barcelona I gave the habit a discipline: the Advanced Studies Diploma (DEA) in Project Criticism and Analysis, at the ETSAB.
When I was 23, on my first day at Estudi Alfa, I made a comment about methodology; less than a week later, that methodology had been established for every architect in the office.
III The Ideal Museum, among 107 trees · 2011
“How to build the Ideal Museum under the condition of the existing trees of the site.”
My 2010 essay on the Ideal Museum reads Semper's spiral through to Wright's Guggenheim. At the Marcano Museum the model met its site, the Botanical Garden of Santo Domingo: a horizontal spiral among 107 existing trees, not one of them felled.
What you can hire today
The Operation Map: the same reading, applied to a business. I read how your operation really works before anything is designed → The Operation Map.
Read your operation before you build anything: request The Operation Map.
Apply this to your project →Working in English, Spanish and French · Systems and documentation delivered in your team's language
Revised 2026-10-26 · Source: the ten processes register (procesos.json), process PR09 · Revision c88c8d1153