David Maestres, MArch. Harvard, BArch. Universidad Simon Bolivar, Caracas, VE

David Maestres was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela where he earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Universidad Simon Bolivar. He later obtained a Master in Architecture (March II) with distinction from Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is an Associate at the AIA and a registered architect in Venezuela. In 1997 he started David Maestres Arquitecto where he designed and built several projects of various scales ranging from stage design, exhibition spaces and single-family houses. After finishing at Harvard in 2002 he worked at the offices of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in New York, where he later became an Associate. While at SOM, he also had the opportunity to work on projects of various complexities and scales (a 40,000 sf Research Facility in the border of Jordan and Israel, a 5 million sf Mixed Use development in Tokyo, a Master Plan for Singapore Marina Bay’s Waterfront, a 600,000 sf College of Criminal Justice in New York, and a 1.3 million sf Skyscraper in Seoul, Korea).

In 2007, he joined TEN Arquitectos as an Associate. There he led projects that also varied from infrastructure, museums, hospitality, residential towers and educational facilities. In 2010 he founded David Maestres Arquitecto (NY), a New York based design studio that focuses on research and design strategies at many different scales and complexities. That same year he founded Planetary ONE, a partnership organized to provide services in the following areas; architecture, landscape, planning, urban design, transportation, and ecological research with the central goal to respond to the needs of human populations with respect to our planet.

In addition to his professional practice, David Maestres has taught at the BAC in Boston, the Career Discovery Program at Harvard School of Design, NJIT College of Architecture and Design, the University of Pennsylvania School of Design (Architecture Department) and Pratt Institute. He has been invited as a design critic to several institutions including Rice, Columbia, Harvard, UPenn, Taubman College in Michigan, Universidad Central de Venezuela among others. He currently teaches 601. III Design Studio at Penn’s Landscape Architecture Program and Design Studio at Pratt Institute.