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Home > Prizes > Prize Recipients > Quilian Riano

Quilian Riano

2014 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Design

Location

New York, NY

Title

Founder of DSGN AGNC (Design Agency); Part-Time Assistant Professor, Parsons, The New School of Design

Area(s) of Research

Design; art; community organization; activism

Education

Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (MArch); University of Florida (BDes)

Country of Birth

Colombia

Links to learn more about Quilian Riano's work
  • dsgnagnc.com

Tags
activism architecture art colombia community design urban planning urbanism
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A portrait of Quilian Riano wearing a dress shirt against a white neutral background.

On a Sioux reservation in South Dakota, Quilian Riano, then a young man in the U.S. Air Force, had been assigned to help the Red Horse Team, the USAF’s engineering corps. Their job: to provide drinking water and roads in areas that lacked the most basic infrastructure. The reservation was a long way from Riano’s home in Hialeah, Florida, and farther still from his birthplace in Bogota, Colombia. Yet he made a profound connection while working with members of the Sioux nation and the Air Force team. “In short, my experience in South Dakota would become an inspiration to my decision to go back to Florida and study design.”

As an architecture and design undergraduate at the University of Florida, he was already imagining “how thoughtful design could improve the urban context of working and low-income-class communities, those often forgotten by the mainstream,” an interest born of his early years living in the Latino working-class community of Hialeah, where he had immigrated with his mother and sister.

He completed a Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and supplemented his formal education with hands-on experience. His collaboration with artist Teddy Cruz on the La Prusia project, in a low-income community in Granada, Nicaragua, however, shifted how Riano thought about participatory processes, “how participation can go beyond a token action during design and become an integral part of a flexible design that changes over time.”

He went on to design a 50-family cooperative housing project in Facatativa, Colombia, and in 2009 founded his firm, DSGN AGNC (Design Agency), with critical activism its guiding tenet.

Riano’s work has been exhibited widely, at the Venice Biennale, Harvard and Cornell Universities, New York’s Center for Architecture, among many others, and has been the recipient of countless awards.

 

Awards and Accomplishments

  • American Society of Landscape Architects
  • The Boston Society of Architects

 

Tags
activism architecture art colombia community design urban planning urbanism

Jury Members

2014 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Design

Andrew Blauvelt

Design Director and Curator, Walker Art Center

Grace Jeffers

Design Historian and Materials Specialist

Cara McCarty

Curatorial Director, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

Dan Rubenstein

Design Writer and Editor

Zoë Ryan

Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, The Art Institute of Chicago

Susan Szenasy

Editor-in-Chief, Metropolis Magazine
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Related Prize Recipients

Teddy Cruz

Teddy Cruz receives the Vilcek Prize in Architecture for creating designs and concepts that make border communities more inclusive and equitable.
Portrait of Teddy Cruz

Jing Liu

Jing Liu receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Architecture for her innovative interdisciplinary work and for developing new approaches to urban housing.
Portrait of Jing Liu

Carlos Motta

Carlos Motta receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts for his engagement, through performance, film, and other media, with the question of representation and democracy, the emotional underpinnings of political awareness, and the tension between dominant accounts of history and marginalized communities.
Portrait of Carlos Motta

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