Alberto Altés studied architecture and urban planning in Valladolid (SP), Barcelona (SP) and Delft (NL), and critical theory/museum studies at the Independent Studies Program in Barcelona (MACBA)(SP). Following a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Department of Architecture at TU Delft (2017-2020), he has been Associate Professor of Architecture at Bergen School of Architecture in Norway, and at the Art, Music and Design School Bergen (KMD, Bergen), before joining Umeå Konsthögskolan as a lecturer in 2024.
He has taught courses in architecture theory and history, architectural design and construction, and graphic expression, with a particular interest in non-normative and critical modes of pedagogy that aim to enable inclusive collective learning. He has also developed and led courses and workshops focusing on experimental/creative/critical writing, as well as numerous design-build projects often based on improvisation and often with wood as a primary material. He is interested in exploring ‘love, care and delay’ as modes of engagement in architecture/spatial/artistic practices, and works often with dance/choreography as a making tool.
He has coedited ‘Intravention, Durations, Effects: Notes of Expansive Sites and Relational Architectures’ (2013, Spurbuch Verlag) and ‘The Power of Experiment’ (2016, Lisbon Architecture Triennale). His latest publications are book chapters in ‘The Constituent Museum’ () (2018, Valiz, Amsterdam), ‘Rethinking the Social in Architecture’ and ‘After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research’, (2019, Actar, Barcelona); and ‘Intraventions in Flux: Towards a Modal Spatial Practice that Moves and Cares’ () as part of ‘Architecture and Collective Life’, (2021, Routledge, London). Together with Klaske Havik, he has recently published ‘Choreography as a tool to understand architectural situatedness: a mediating intervention at Hiedanranta industrial heritage site, Finland’ () in The Journal of Architecture (2022)
Latest and key exhibition work has been the last two ‘End of Year Exhibitions’, at Bergen School of Architecture, in 2022 and 2023; ‘WildCare: Architectures of Love and Correspondence’ () at the Porto Design Biennale in 2021; and ‘The Exhibition that Happened in the Corridor’, TUDelft, in 2020.
He has been a guest lecturer at Konstfack - The University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm (Sweden) and at the Academy of Landscape and Territorial Studies in Tromsø (Norway). From 2011 to 2017 he was assistant professor at Umeå School of Architecture, where he co-founded and co-directed the Laboratory of Immediate Architectural Intervention; and from 2006 to 2011 he taught at the ETSAV School of Architecture in Sant Cugat (Barcelona). In his PhD dissertation ‘Delaying the Image: Towards an Aesthetics of Encounter’, () he approaches film as a form that thinks and as an apparatus of spatial critique, exploring ‘the encounter’ as a slow, caring and open form of practice.
He is also co-founder and partner of LandLab Arkitektur AB, a transversal practice built around forms of care and situatedness. /