Assistant Professor
Dr Julio Diarte is an Assistant Professor at UMA. He earned his bachelor’s degree in architecture from Universidad Nacional de Asunción (2005), master’s in architecture from The Polytechnic University of Catalunya in Barcelona (2009), and his Ph.D. in Architecture from Penn State University (2021). His research intersects the areas of design for climate change, craft, and digital fabrication, and building material processes. In his teaching, he focuses on engaging students in material-based projects combining analog and digital tools to design and prototype building components. Julio received the 2020 Engineering for Change (E4C) Research Fellowship in Habitat and 2022 E4C Expert Fellowship.
As a teacher in architecture, my primary goal is to provide students with a framework to develop their design, critical-making, and systems thinking skills. Consequently, I focus on a design-by-making approach using craft- or digital-based tools. This approach helps students elicit architectural ideas from materials and their associated fabrication/construction processes while at the same time making sense of the complex relationship between architecture and environment. The process involves active learning strategies where I teach them how to design and prototype based on material capabilities and materials availability.