Juan David Grisales

Juan David Grisales is a registered Colombian architect and urban planner. After receiving his undergraduate degree at Cornell University, he returned to Colombia to work as an urban designer on a metropolitan masterplan for the Coffee Region with the planning department of the City of Pereira; where he developed two independent proposals that sought strategies to integrate the territory by repurposing underutilized infrastructures.

Grisales has served as Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the National University of Colombia and the Catholic University of Pereira. There, he also established an interdisciplinary research group to analyze and assist informal settlements displaced by the armed conflict in Colombia.

He is currently pursuing a joint degree in Landscape Architecture and Design Studies (Urbanism, Landscape, and Ecology) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (MLA 1 AP & MDes (ULE), 2020). The main interests in his current studies concern ecology and sociocultural issues to see how landscape architecture could serve as a medium to generate physical and social integrations at multiple scales in places troubled by conflict and contested or fragmented territories where the profession is not yet established. Sponsored by Harvard University, he is currently conducting research in Southeast Asia and Latin America.