Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo y Lopez

Lecturer in Architectural Technology
Graduate School of Design

Jose Luis García del Castillo y López is an architect, computational designer, and educator. He advocates for a future where programming and code are tools as natural to artists as paper and pencil. In his work, he explores creative opportunities at the intersection of design, technology, fabrication, data, and art.

Jose Luis is a registered architect, Doctor of Design and Master in Design Studies in Technology by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. As a structural engineer at Ayesa, he has consulted for international firms such as OMA, Mecanoo, and Cesar Pelli. Additionally, he has worked as Data Visualization Architect at Fathom Information Design, designing and building platforms to help clients such as Google, Samsung, and Nike understand their data. More recently, he has worked as Research Engineer within the Generative Design Group at Autodesk Inc., developing experimental prototypes to disrupt the AEC industry through advanced robotics and machine learning. Jose Luis is also the co-founder of ParametricCamp, an international organization whose mission is to spread the knowledge of computational design among designers and architects.

His current research focuses on the development of digital frameworks that help democratize access to robotic technologies for designers and artists. In his doctoral dissertation, he proposed Enactive Robotics, a new model for enhanced human-robot interaction using machines as an exploratory platform through concurrent control. When applied to digital fabrication, for example, this model systematically enables closed-loop control mechanisms, opening up the possibility to incorporate material feedback or human mediation in real-time.