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RESEARCH
What is the Library?
MEAL is happy to share the resources that inspire and inform the work produced at the lab. In this library you will be able to find the sources of data sets, books, papers, journals, articles, websties, and more.
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What does MEAL research?
MEAL researches the pressing societal challenges of our time—migration, spatial inequality, housing shortage, and more—through architecture, design, and critical inquiry.
Rooted in creative thinking and unconventional ideation, MEAL approaches research as a generative process that blends disciplines, methods, and perspectives. From geospatial analysis to storytelling and speculative design, MEAL's work adapts to complex realities and imagines new, more possitive futures.
Re: Housing Futures is a collaborative initiative of Cornell AAP's Housing Innovation Lab, Regenerative Architecture Lab, Circular Construction Lab, and Environmental Systems Lab. It explores innovative and sustainable ways of retrofitting and improving NYC’s residential buildings in response to Local Law 97 which requires carbon neutrality by 2050.
This project explores how to increase polyvalence in an existing building. The retrofit proposal incorporates the interchangeability of activities through balanced room sizes, movable space dividers, and multiplying circulation routes and room access. This can help mitigate privacy and daylight concerns through the window and respond to changes in household composition.
P.C.P. Panamerican Cooperation Project
This project represents an ongoing research that started at Cornell AAP. The research explores the role of the architect and architecture, as a discipline, in the ongoing migration crisis in the Americas. Through various approaches and speculative design, this research reflects and iterates around migration.
P.C.P. Panamerican Passport
A person under a migratory process might face several difficulties and challenges in its journey. One of those difficulties might be the questioning of its identity, sense of belonging and nationality. Since migrants can be conceptualized as people in constant mobility, I ask the following questions. What defines our nationality? Is it a passport? How is a nation-state determined? What defines our identity? Is our identity defined by where we come from? Or is it defined by where we want to go? In this project, I explored the previous questions by proposing a continental passport for the western hemisphere, which can be understood as a Pan-American identification document. This proposal is framed under the current migration crisis in the Americas. It emerges as an alternative response to current challenges such as migration regulation, public policies, and international cooperation.
This website focuses on the relationship between migration, criminal rates, and cartel violence. By mapping out the hardships migrants face, including the number of territories, climates, and cartel-controlled zones they must navigate, the project illustrates how deeply intertwined these issues are. The site visually depicts correlations between migrant deaths, migration routes, crime hotspots, and the distribution of shelters and support infrastructure across Mexico.
The Spacetime of "Race" and Nationality: From Colonial Mexico to The Latin American Diaspora
The cultural encounter between America and Europe reshaped the world, giving rise to coloniality, which extends beyond epistemological and cultural realms to include spatial dimensions, particularly through race. This essay examines how race shaped colonial Mexico's spaces and its enduring impact on the Latin American diaspora, where nationality and race remain key factors in migration experiences. It highlights the continuity of racial classification systems, comparing “El Sistema de Castas” with modern migrant categories. By analyzing artworks like Las Castas and using Hein de Haas’s definitions, it critiques contemporary classifications, showing their parallels with colonial-era racial ordering systems.
Research will be published in summer 2025