The Birth of a Radical Architecture (2021- present)



as written by Princeton and our own Academic Definition

 

In the chaotic whirlwind of 2021—as Venezuela’s universities sputtered and traditional firms floundered—two visionaries in social and environmental design for the disenfranchised, Marcos Coronel Bravo and María Beatriz (Mabe) García Rincón, ignited a movement. This wasn’t just another platform; it was a rebellion against stale education and disconnected design—a fiery fusion of pedagogy, grassroots action, and architectural alchemy.  



 

The Spark: Years in the Making

 


Enter Khristian Ceballos—a restless innovator and precise architect who’d spent years dreaming of an architecture school that broke the mold. No more mindless CAD drills, no more theory divorced from reality. His vision? A living, breathing curriculum where design met community, where buildings told stories, and students became change makers. But dreams need wings—and that’s where Marcos and María Beatriz set the scene on fire, and Khristian ignited the kitchen stove with his intricate ideas working endless nights with Daniel Otero.

 

The Lightning Strike


 

Marcos the mad genius behind "Thinking Outside the Box," was already tearing up the rulebook with his disruptive pedagogy. María Beatriz or Mabe, fresh from pioneering participatory first person observation for three years in El Calvario, was a force of nature—strategist, urbanist, multilateral, gender and environmental architect, all catalyst. When they collided (thanks to fate and an online chat), the energy was electric.  



 

One afternoon at Hansin—El Hatillo’s funky artisan hideout—they sketched their manifesto on napkins between sips of coffee. The mission? Build a dual rocket ship:


1. An Open-Access School to blast students beyond CAD into real-world experiments.  


2. A Guerrilla Design Firm to turn communities into co-creators, not just clients.  



 

The Supercharge: Khristian’s Vision, Unleashed

 


Khristian’s brainchild wasn’t just included—it became the beating heart of the project. Finally, his integrative approach had a home. But ideas alone don’t change the world—action does. That’s where María Beatriz’s convening sorcery kicked in.  

- Mabe, Khristian and Marcos summoned the tribe: Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV’s) brightest rebels Luciano Landaeta, Sara Valente, MarceloErortuguey, Julio Kowolenko, Rodrigo Armas, radical pedagogues, and international heavyweights like Alfredo Brillembourg. 


Maria Beatriz (Mabe)  hacked time and in weeks, not years. They built governance, forged curricula, and launched a people’s architecture movement, climate finance arrangement that would merge cross-cutting topics like gender and climate initiatives to leverage finance in the future.




 

Founders
' Triage: María Beatriz (Mabe) García Rincón - The Architect-Whisperer; Marcos Coronel Bravo - The Edu-Anarchist; & Khristian Ceballos - The Visionary Provocateur.



The consortium of thinkers and doers:


​

• Major players: Julio Kowolenko and Rafael Machado

• The Pedagogy Visionaries: Luciano Landaeta, Sara Valente, Marcelo Ertorteguy
, Daniel Otero.

• The UCV Mavericks: Ricardo Sanz, Joao, Alessandro Familglietti, Tono Salas, Walter Leone, Henry Rueda

• New Players: Dean Javier Caricatto has joined our adventure, and capacity building/knowledge transfer journey as of 2023. A great new incredible team player who is pivoting the academic and in situ constructions of prototypes into reality.

​

Why This Wasn’t Just Another Project?


 

This is architecture as a verb—a riotous, collaborative explosion where:  
- Khristian’s decades-old dream finally took flight. Marcos’ unorthodox and avante garde teaching became a lifeline for stranded students.  María Beatriz’s (Mabe's) convening genius, finance understanding through climate and social bonds, turned chatter into overnight impact.  

 



No red tape. No gatekeepers. Just raw creativity + ruthless execution. The future of architecture and the built environment wasn’t coming—it had already landed.  Spaces once lost in the minds of its populace, have begun to turn into vision boards for action.

​

Global South-Global North Create Bridge for Knwoledge Exshange

​​

Our first win: We signed with Bjorn Bertelsen, Director at GRIP at the University of Bergen, Norway a MoU that gave our alliance a clear mission: alleviate poverty using finance levers to unlock financing, making informal settlements bankable sites for upgrades and retrofits, and sustainable infrastructure to enter forgotten city spaces to create a more uniform city landscape for equity to grow from the seed up. Maria Beatriz and Marcos worked with the Norwegian team for eight months to launch the platform, sign the consortium between real-estate developers and architects and incredible universities that bridge the Global North with the Global South.

​

Our second win: Marcos took the lead learning from the first MoU with Universidad de Moron and Alejadro Borrachia, Dean of the School of Architecture. Maria-Beatriz (Mabe) and Marcos negotaiated a MoU, Marcos leading this signature and Maria establishing a model to scale from her MoU signatures at multilaterals and her experience negotiating. Marcos led from the architecture models learned in Chile from in-situ protyping, and Maria brought her 6 years of housing experience at WorldBank/IFC at the time. Both created the necessary backdrop to sign in one partner from the Global North and a second from the lobal South, tying in partnership model for the organization.