Duarte Santo

Duarte Santo (he/his/him) MLA, March, PGUD

Educator, Researcher, practitioner and cultural producer operating across art, architecture, landscape, urban design and tourism. His scholarship and work, framed by an intersectional approach to Landscapes, centers on the agency, responsibility, and accountability of design in confronting urgent socio-environmental challenges. His interdisciplinary practice engages more-than-human mobilities, climate justice, landscapes and island futures, integrating digital tools, artificial intelligence, and eco-biosociotechnical systems to envision adaptive and equitable environments.

A fully qualified Architect, having studied in Porto and London, Duarte holds a postgraduate degree in Planning and Design of the Urban Environment from the University of Porto and a Masters degree in Landscape Architecture from ETSAB/Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona. He is an experienced practitioner with 20 years of significant experience working across disciplines on projects of all scales and stages, from design to implementation and construction, in both the private and public sectors. In parallel, Duarte has experienced design from many angles, holding leadership and managerial roles as an architect, landscape and urban designer, business owner, educator, researcher, and cultural producer, which has enabled him to gain a comprehensive range of spatial practices and construct a thorough and critical understanding of design in the built environment.

He co-founded and was managing partner of Jigsaw (2002-2008), a design practice established in Porto, and has worked professionally as an architect, landscape and Urban designer at award-winning practices like OMA/Rem Koolhaas, in Rotterdam or Allies and Morrison in London and high profile projects such as Casa da Música in Porto, the Lisbon Aquarium extension, the Portuguese consulate of Portugal in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the former Commonwealth Institute/Design Museum, London and urban (master)plans in London and the Middle East.

Engaging with artists and cultural practices to create and curate interdisciplinary projects, Duarte co-founded TRANSLOCAL in 2016, a research project and publishing platform promoting the dialogue between local and global contemporary urban cultures. He conceived and co-coordinated the curatorial project "A2V: gazes, visions and expressions of the contemporary landscape of Madeira," featuring artist residences and exhibitions; the international workshop "Landscape & Tourism in Zagreb" in Croatia, TRACE, a research/creation and exhibition project for the London Festival of Architecture. His project, "On the im/permanence of the (is)land," was displayed in 2021 at the landscape, resilience, and Art section of the Italian Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2025, his collaborative work with Pablo Perez-Ramos and Stefania Staniscia,, “ Seven Mediterranean Islands: Soil Formation and Anthropic Pressur,”, is part of the Italian Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. 

Duarte has taught design studios and seminars in architecture, urban design, tourism, and Landscape architecture at universities in the UK, including the University of Westminster, the University of Greenwich in London, the Stanford University program abroad in Oxford, and in The USA at Cornell University, where he taught seminars on Material Flows and Diversity, Equity; inclusion, and Access in Landscapes and conceived and lead the [Eco]Sensorial Studio, exploring the senses, sensory assemblages, and ecologies and the Islands Futures Studio, as a framework for inquiry and speculation on global issues, climate futures,  design ethics and practice in more-than-human interactions in island environments. He developed research and teaching on climate Urbanism, convivial futures, and design justice at the intersection of migration and climate change [Translocal Ecologies Studio and Convivial Urban Futures Seminar] as part of a grant from the Cornell Migrations Global Challenge/Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative. In 2023, Duarte was recognized in the President's Awards for Employee Excellence - Culture of Belonging as an Outstanding Educator in the Merrill Presidential Scholars Program and received the Honors Award from the American Society of Landscape Architecture for supervision of the thesis "Designing Spectrums: the Sensory Word of Autism and its Design Implications." 

Selected Publications

• Duarte Santo and Maria Goula (2025). Entangled Openness. Revisiting Open Space through Landscape and Design Agency, Ri-Vista : ricerche per la progettazione del paesaggio : XXIII, 1
• Duarte Santo (2025). The Afterlife of Forms: On Design and Ethics of Incomplete and Evolving, Open-Ended, Generative Complex Systems, in Bina et al. Eds. Form Follows Life: Reinventing cities, non-a online competition report.
• J. A. Guridi, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Duarte Santo, Maria Goula, Cristobal Cheyre, Lee Humphreys and Marco Rangel. (2025). From Fake Perfects to Conversational Imperfects: Exploring Image-Generative AI as a Boundary Object for Participatory Design of Public Spaces. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, N2, Article CSCW014, 33 pages.
• Duarte Santo, Maria Goula, Lee Humphreys, Cristobal Cheyre, Jose A. Guridi and Marco Rangel (2025) “Translocal Imaginaries and Sense of Belonging: Narratives and Mythologies in the Design of the Migrant Urban Commons” AMPS PROCEEDINGS JOURNAL SERIES 40.1. ISSN 2398-9467.
• J. A Guridi, Cristobal Cheyre, Maria Goula, Duarte Santo, Lee Humphreys, Aishwarya Shankar & Achilleas Souras (2024). Image Generative AI to Design Public Spaces: a Reflection of how AI Could Improve Co-Design of Public Parks. Digital Government: Research and Practice.
• Pablo Perez-Ramos,  Duarte Santo and Stefania Staniscia (2022) “Seven Mediterranean Islands: Soil Formations and Anthropic Pressures”, in Ricci, Mosè, Margherita Pasquali, Silvia Mannocci (eds.) MedWays Open Atlas ,  letteraventidue. p.78-86. ISBN 978-886-24-2735-7

Artworks and Exhibitions (Selected)

• Weathering Wor(l)ds. Kochi-Mizuris Biennale, India (upcoming 2026)
• Liminal Listening: Towards a Non-colonial Lexicon in Landscapes. Periscope | Microscope Gallery, London, UK (upcoming 2025)
• Seven Mediterranean Islands: Soil Formation and Anthropic Pressures. 19th Venice Biennale of Architecture. (2025)
• On the Im/Permanence of the (Is)Land, 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture. (2021)
• Trace, London Festival of Architecture (2017)
• A2V: Gazes and expressions of the contemporary landscape of Madeira, MUDAS Museu Arte Contemporânea, Madeira, Portugal (2013)

Relevant Research Projects 

• LIMINAL LISTENING: Whispers Of Amphibious Worlds

  With Deepta Sateesh, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, MAHE, India, and Corinna Dean, University of Westminster/ARCA – Archive of Rural Contemporary Architecture, UK.

• THOUGHT SUMMIT “LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS AND SOCIETY”

  Cornell University Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society Grant​ 

• THE SOUND OF SILENCE: Mapping Immigrants’ Preferences and Use of Public Space Through Social Media Toward an Inclusive Design and Management of The Urban Commons

  Cornell Migrations Grand Global Challenge / Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative 

  with Maria Goula, Dep. Landscape Architecture, Lee Humphreys, Communications,  and Cristobal Cheyre, Information Sciences at Cornell University

• ON THE IM/PERMANENCE OF THE (IS)LAND. Resilience Landscapes in Madeira Island, Portugal

  with Wamãe Antropologia Pública, CRIA – Centros em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, Department of Landscape Architecture, Cornell University         

• MEDITERRANEAN ISLANDS. NARRATIVES OF SOIL

  Medways “Le Vie dei Mediterraneo” Research Cluster. University of Trento, University of Rome and Linceo 

  With Stefania Staniscia, University of West Virginia and Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Harvard GSD