Alejandro Varela López is an architect from the Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo (FADU-UdelaR), where he has also taught in design, history, theory, and criticism, and technology. He holds a Master's degree in Architectural Communication from the Escuela Ténica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM-UPM), where he defended his thesis Fricciones: Atlas de un Viaje de Arquitectura. In 2023, he co-directed the Architecture Trip with the proposal Atlas of Cultural Landscapes. His professional practice, developed across Montevideo, Madrid, Porto Alegre, and New York, brings together architecture, curatorship, and teaching. His projects range from architectural design to the creation of alternative pedagogical experiences, such as the third edition of Edumeet, Fricciones: International Meeting on Exchanges in Learning, co-curated with the collective MAca7.

Understanding architecture as an infrastructure of relations, his research focuses on redefining and expanding the concept of surface in its relationship with water. Interested in the interaction that architecture generates with its environment while operating simultaneously at multiple scales, his project addresses the main threats derived from urban growth and the energy transition on planetary and local hydrology, microclimate, biodiversity, and communities. These processes have triggered emergencies such as floods, droughts, and shortages of water and food, to which the most vulnerable communities have had to respond collectively. His hypothesis posits that the forms of reaction emerging from the commons open up the possibility of revaluing collective processes with the potential to be translated into architectural terms and replicated in different critical zones, making visible the urgency of establishing a dialogue between the programmatic and spatial organization of the city, nature, and communities. His doctoral proposal is therefore grounded in the study of the surface as a common, integrating in a transversal way socio-spatial, ecological, and political dimensions in which architecture is ontologically involved.