Soto Aguirre, Álvaro

He graduated as an Architect from the Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM), Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), in 1981. Since 1989, he has been a Professor in the Department of Architectural Design at ETSAM, where he currently holds the position of Associate Professor. In October 2010, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, Project Tools: Time and Memory in Buildings, which was awarded the distinction of Outstanding Cum Laude. Since 2014, he has coordinated the Soto Teaching Unit.

In 1981, he was awarded a collective grant from the Spanish Ministry of Culture for the publication of the book Modern Architectures. In February 1982, he received the prestigious Rome Prize, obtaining the Architecture Fellowship at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, where he spent two years undertaking research and study (1982–1983). In July of the same year, he was awarded a Palladio Fellowship at the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza, Italy. In 1985, he received a research grant from the Spanish Ministry of Public Works and Urban Development to study and document the work of architect Agustín Aguirre López. In 1994, he was awarded a British Council grant to curate and install the exhibition A New Generation of Spanish Architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London. In 2006, he received a faculty mobility grant to undertake academic activities at the Faculty of Engineering LTH, School of Architecture, Lund University, Sweden.

He also completed a three-month pre-doctoral research stay at Robinson College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, as a Visiting Scholar in 1994.

Since the establishment of the Master’s Programme in Advanced Architectural Design (MPAA) in 2010, he has been a member of its teaching staff. During the academic years 2013–2014 and 2014–2015, he directed Line 1 of the MPAA programme and coordinated the seminar Whims: Proposals for the Immediate Future within MPAA7. The outcomes of this research were presented at ARCO Madrid 2015 and later at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. He also directed the MPAA8 workshop Autopsy, presented at ARCO 2016, and contributed to the publication of the book Dreamy ARCO, sponsored by ARCO International Contemporary Art Fair.

During the 2016–2017 academic year, he collaborated with the NGO Acción Geoda to design and construct a communal laundry facility and a hammam in the Tessaout Valley of the High Atlas Mountains, Morocco, based on student projects. The results of this initiative were published in the book Travel, Think, Build. In 2021–2022, he received a UPM Teaching Innovation and Quality Improvement Grant for the project Living with Waste: A Guide to Good Practices for Household Recycling. More recently, he directed the MPAA10 seminar Evaporation, developed in collaboration with artist Eugenio Ampudia, and the MPAA13 seminar BASURALEZA.

He conceived and directed the first, second, and third editions of the Recent Theses series at the COAM Architecture Foundation, an initiative aimed at disseminating doctoral research produced at the various Schools of Architecture in Madrid. He also coordinated the publication of the proceedings from Recent Theses 1 and Recent Theses 2. His academic career has been recognized with two six-year national research awards (sexenios de investigación).