Yazmín Crespo-Claudio

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Assistant Professor of Architecture

Affiliate Faculty, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies [CLACS]; Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity [CSGGE]; Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Design [BSSD].

Yazmín M. Crespo-Claudio is a Puerto Rican architect, historian, and educator with over twenty years of teaching and practice in Puerto Rico, the United States, and Spain. Her transdisciplinary work—spanning practice, theory, and art—explores architectural and cultural counter-narratives as collective, affective, and multimodal experiences. Through what she calls an architecture of relation—a spatial and pedagogical practice that enacts care, inclusivity, and resistance while foregrounding interdependence, opacity, and archipelagic thought—Crespo-Claudio advances critical and decolonial approaches to design and pedagogy. Her scholarship examines the intersections of architecture, education, gender, and territory, emphasizing pedagogical experiments alongside research and teaching in architectural histories and theories from and with the Americas and the Caribbean.

She is the cofounder and director of taller Creando Sin Encargos (tCSE), an award-winning collective dedicated to socially engaged, participatory, and decolonial design for urban justice since 2012. Through this work, tCSE has developed projects that democratize design, challenge socio-territorial inequalities, and recover community knowledge often excluded from canonical and global architectural discourse. The collective’s work—exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the 13th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo—continues to inform critical frameworks for teaching, practice, and research across the Americas.

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Crespo-Claudio teaches history and theory seminars, design studios, and critical spatial practices rooted in Caribbean and decolonial frameworks. Her teaching emphasizes inclusive, community-based learning, socially engaged design, and research-driven studios that connect affect, activism, and design justice. Previously, she was a Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and served as Director of the Department of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Interior Design and Coordinator of the Design-Build MArch program at the Universidad Ana G. Méndez in Puerto Rico.

In addition to her academic and collective work, Crespo-Claudio has worked as an Associate Architect at Perkins Eastman in New York City, where her built projects—such as the award-winning TKTS Booth in Times Square—reflect her ongoing interest in public space, collaboration, and the social dimensions of design. Her work has been published, exhibited, and recognized nationally and internationally, and she has been invited to deliver keynote lectures and presentations at conferences worldwide, contributing to critical dialogues on feminist practices, Caribbean and hemispheric spatial theories, participatory design, and socially engaged architectural practice.