José Ibarra
- Assistant Professor of Architecture
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Architecture and environmental uncertainty
319 Stuckeman
- Email jmibarra@psu.edu
Biography
José Ibarra is a Venezuelan designer, researcher, and educator whose interdisciplinary work explores the intersection of architecture and environmental uncertainty. Ibarra is an assistant professor of architecture at Penn State, director of Studio José Ibarra, and co-founder of House Operations.
Ibarra’s research centers on architecture’s capacity to meaningfully engage with crisis, whether social, ecological, or planetary. Drawing on environmental humanities, gender studies, queer theory, and decolonial thought, he develops multifocal approaches that reframe architecture as a responsive and relational practice amid social unrest, environmental degradation, and climate crisis. Through design, curation, writing, and teaching, his work examines how architecture mediates relationships among bodies, communities, species, materials, and environmental processes.
Recent projects include Werewolf: The Architecture of Lunacy, Shapeshifting, and Material Metamorphosis (AR+D, 2022), co-edited with Caroline O’Donnell; Table Manners, a series of participatory and performative gatherings that uses architecture to examine ecological, social, gendered, and queer forms of collective life; Andean Ecologies, Cosmologies, and Fictions, a research and drawing project studying ancestral and contemporary Andean practices as models for ecological design and relational understandings of the world; and Casa Libertad, a private residence in Tecate, Mexico. He has held editorial roles with ASSOCIATION, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Pidgin Magazine, and the Architecture Reading Group, and currently serves as Editor-at-Large for Wedge.
Ibarra’s teaching has earned numerous accolades, including the 2022 ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching Award, the 2024 ACSA/AIA Housing Design Education Award, and the 2025 Tulane Honorable Achievement for Interdisciplinary Climate Change Curriculum in Architecture. His design and scholarly work have been recognized and published internationally and supported by organizations including the Graham Foundation, which has awarded grants for Latinx Coalition Chats (2023), developed with Liz Gálvez, and Andean Ecologies, Cosmologies, and Fictions (2026).
He is currently developing two books –Table Manners: Participatory Design amidst Planetary Crises, under contract with Applied Research & Design, examines participatory design through performance, collective gathering, and public engagement. Architecture, Time, and the Anthropocene: Designing with Geoempathy, under contract with Routledge, positions architecture as a mediator of process, kinship, and deep time, calling for forms of design attentive to relationships among humans, animals, plants, grounds, and atmospheres.
Ibarra was an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Colorado Denver (2022–2025) and the University of Virginia (2020–2022), and previously served as Urban Edge Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (2019–2020). He has also taught at Cornell University and Princeton University, and has practiced architecture at firms including Barkow Leibinger, CODA, and Studio Eber. He holds an Associate in Arts and Architecture from Miami Dade College, a Bachelor of Architecture with a minor in German Studies from Cornell University, and a Post-Professional Master of Architecture from Princeton University, where he also earned a Certificate in Media and Modernity. At Princeton, he received multiple honors, including the 2019 Robert Geddes Post-Professional Award, the 2018 Howard Crosby Butler Fellowship, and the Princeton University Fellowship.
Ibarra is currently accepting new graduate students and welcomes inquiries from prospective advisees who share interests in: environmental and climate uncertainty, architecture and deep time, more-than-human relations, participatory and performative design, gender studies and queer theory, ecological and cosmological traditions rooted in Indigenous and Global South knowledge systems, and experimental modes of architectural representation.
Collected Works
