MEAL (Making Experimental Architecture Lab) is a transdisciplinary architecture and research practice that reflects on societal challenges through design, theory, and collaboration. It operates as both a studio and a lab—where experimentation is not just encouraged but necessary, and where architecture is understood as a medium for inquiry, storytelling, and social transformation.
 

The name MEAL holds many meanings. Like a meal itself, it can take many forms—breakfast or dinner, a shared ritual or a quick bite, nourishing or indulgent, improvised or carefully prepared. This semantic flexibility reflects our approach: plural, layered, and responsive. MEAL embraces the contradictions and complexities of contemporary life, drawing from multiple traditions, disciplines, and geographies.
 

As an acronym, MEAL takes on different shapes depending on the lens:
 

• Migration Ecologies Architecture Lab
  Investigating the built, natural, and social environments shaped by migration, mobility, and systemic violence—especially across the Americas and Mexico.

• Methods, Epistemic Americas Lab
  Questioning how knowledge is produced and who gets to produce it, MEAL centers alternative, situated, and often overlooked forms of architectural thinking.

• Mixed Elements Architecture Lab
  Embracing hybridity—in materials, technologies, cultures, and histories—as a way to build architectures that are not afraid of complexity or contradiction.

• Mestizo Environments Americas Landscape
  Engaging the idea of mestizaje as a spatial, cultural, and environmental condition that calls for inclusive and negotiated design practices.
   

Through these shifting lenses, MEAL works across contexts, mediums, and scales, bringing research and design. MEAL proposes architecture as a shared table—where different ideas, methods, and communities come together. It is a practice that designs not just buildings, but also processes, conversations, and tools for reflecting on the world.
 

MEAL is a banquet of ideas, a method and a menu. Always critical. Always experimental. Always unfinished. Always in dialogue with the world it seeks to nourish.