Alejandro Echeverri - Faculty

Professor Alejandro Echeverri is an architect, urban planner, and Colombian academic. Architect from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB), Medellín, he is candidate for a Ph.D. in Urban Planning at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Barcelona (ETSAB) in the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).

He is co-founder and director of URBAM, a center for urban and environmental studies at EAFIT University in Medellín, Colombia, and a Harvard GSD Loeb Fellow. Since 2022, he is
a member of the jury of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, founded by the College of Architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, in the United States.

Alejandro Echeverri's experience combines architectural, urban, environmental, and planning projects. Since 2010, he has been working with URBAM on environmental, urban, and social issues in developing countries as an international consultant and advisor to UN-Habitat and the World Bank, especially in countries with weak political and institutional structures. He is also dedicated to design through his studio, Alejandro Echeverri + Valencia Arquitectos, focusing on projects with low environmental impact for tropical regions.

He has collaborated as a professor, lecturer, and jury member with various national (Colombia) and international institutions, including the LSE Cities Master program at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and as a design critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Between 2004 and 2008, he was the director of EDU, the urban development company of the city of Medellín, where he led the strategy of social urbanism, seeking to transform and improve the neighborhoods with the greatest problems of inequality and violence with the support and association of the mayor of the city, Sergio Fajardo,  turning Medellín into a future reference for other cities.

He received the 2016 Obayashi Prize in Japan.

Alejandro Echeverri joined Tecnológico de Monterrey as Distinguished Visiting Professor in Urbanism for the School of Architecture, Art and Design. 

• Loeb Fellow Graduate, School of Design, Harvard University.
• Master in Advanced Studies in Urbanism and Territorial Planning and Ph.D. Candidate in Urbanism and Territorial Planning. ETSAB, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).
• Urbanist Architect, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB).

• “Medellín re-escribe sus barrios" in MANITO, Félix (ed.). Ciudades creativas (vol. 5): espacio público y cultura en acción. Barcelona: Fundación Kreanta, 2013.