Who I am

Born on a little island containing enough pride to match that of an entire continent reinforces the belief that you can do anything you put your mind to. That ‘anything’ for me this was becoming an architect after finding out my grandfather had built his house atop a mountain at the cost of his own blood, sweat and tears. Before the norms of my island had an opportunity to cast my character in concrete we moved to Fort Buchanan, a military base that exposed me to life beyond water formed walls. Here I discovered innumerable narratives, my imagination was set free, and boundaries were tested beyond elasticity, then redrawn.

Some years later, descending as a 10 year old above Albuquerque, New Mexico, a flurry of emotions transformed into shock, I had been transported from a paradise to a place void of everything but sand painted buildings in shades of brown. It will get better; thoughts of optimism bubbled then popped much like our excitement for snow, little did we know proper attire could make the difference. We gave it its fifteen minutes of fame prior to disparaging its existence from inside our new box. Still, I would stare outside and dream of worlds undiscovered on every snowflake. This time moving stretched our family ties and limited a joy compared to that which we had amassed in Puerto Rico. Here we found places of solitary confinement within our minds, while our lives bumped against color coded communities. Having found ours, small as it was, helped us adjust and make a world of our own filled with memories and new joys.

Two years later we moved to San Antonio, the place I have now called home since. It is a place where our evolution as individuals would see growth limited only by will. Equipped with parted hair and pants with a significant distance between hem and ankles, I arrived, wearing strapped glasses too big for my face and content failing to match its cover. A passionate idealist, depending on perspective, I began with a struggle to write a new book of my life; the overarching theme, dreamer turned wizard. I grew up watching everything Merlin and wanting to be Michael Angelo, nun-chucks not brushes.

Soon after the constraints of public K-12 education were removed, I discovered peeling back layers of protection that I had cast aside the values of questioning and dreaming unwittingly but architecture added back context to dreams and ideas anchored by life experiences. Challenged by standard norms and criteria in architecture school, I could follow sheep and risk losing the fundamental elements of my ideas, or risk failing in the pursuit of a better solution. Challenging convention requires the redefinition of failure from a circumstance to be avoided to a required variable for true measure of success.

Through adulthood drawing turned to utility, a problem solving tool and I found excitement in the opportunity to view spoken and written language as frequencies of conveyance for my dreams and their rules subject to interpretation in the scales of time.

Twenty years is long enough to know what you are. It is also long enough to discover what you are not. Architecture gave me both. I survived the years when the profession contracted by doing the work others avoided — stairs, envelopes, permitting, the unglamorous architecture that holds everything else together. While this brought stability, it salted life a little less every day, but I knew there was value to be realized in these efforts. What I discovered was not a specialty but a way of life, a pattern to my work to where I found joy. Pursuing what caught my interest, digesting the complexity, finding the core of problems, setting order, and executing. This made me someone trusted with work that mattered at scale. The Linda Pace Foundation, the UTSA Science and Engineering Building, the UH Community Hospitals, the Parking Garage GTC at the San Antonio International Airport. Large, complex, consequential work. 

The itch to discover what else can make me happy persists.

+FABstudio began as an architectural exploration, a way to satisfy my curiosity and became something else entirely the night my wife stopped me mid-sentence. I had spent years developing what I believed were the core concepts — a modular system for living, adaptable spaces, units that could reconfigure a home the way a sentence reconfigures meaning when you move a word. I was describing the plans and units with great enthusiasm when she asked, simply and without apology: "who wants to live in a house full of lofts where the walls don't reach the ceiling? I don't. And there needs to be a way to lock the rooms for privacy". The conversation stopped and the rabbit hole opened. The ceiling was the conflict I had been circling for years without landing — and she walked directly on it. What followed was a descent into first principles: what lives in the ceiling, what can be removed, what must be redesigned so the system and the reality of how people live can finally occupy the same space. The units that began as simple moveable wardrobes became, through that process, the core solution it was meant to be.

That same instinct — toward the problem behind the problem, the solution that doesn't yet have a name — has been the quiet thread running through everything. Through the unglamorous early work. Through the projects that needed someone to hold complexity without flinching. Through a modular system that architects told me wouldn't work, which I have come to understand means only that it hasn't been done yet. My grandfather built his house among the clouds, answering no one's definition of possible but his own. Now I find myself at a place where dreams extend to the clouds with diverse responses to what architecture is and could be, and the role technology can play in shaping our environments at individual, regional, and global scales. Architecture gave my vision methodology, +FAB gives it freedom, and combined they assist me in building above the clouds.

Thank you for reading my story.

Education

Masters of Architecture
UTSA 2012

B.S. Architecture
UTSA 2007

AIA Professional Practice Leadership Program 2014

Professional Background

Registered Architect - Texas
Registered Accessibility Specialist (RAS)

2022-Present
Project Architect & QAQC
Marmon Mok Architects

2019-Present
RAS & Owner
Texas469

2015-2022
Designer & Project Manager
Alamo Architects

2011-2015,
Designer & Project Manager
GNA Architecture

2007-2011, Designer
B&A Architects, Inc.

2006-2007,
Draftsman & Graphics Manager
Davis+Rexrode Architects

In twenty years of professional architectural experience I've had the opportunity to contribute in a wide range of projects including graphic design, medical, civic/cultural, K-12, religious, federal, commercial, and multi-family. Throughout these projects my capacities extend to all phases as a designer, project architect, and / or documents production team member.