In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel speaks with Venezuelan architect and theorist Daniela Atencio, author of Robotic Translations: Design Processes – Latin America, (Actar Publishers) about how Latin America is reprogramming the future of digital design—through resistance, reinvention, and entanglement.

Atencio, trained at SCI-Arc and now professor of architecture at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia—where she founded the first architectural robotics program in Latin America—challenges the sterile universality of Western architectural robotics labs. Atencio draws from the lived complexity of the Latin American context—where scarcity breeds ingenuity, and every robotic gesture is entangled with human error, material resistance, and historical ghosts. She proposes a radical departure from dominant narratives of control and precision, toward a design ethos informed by chaos theory, mestizaje, and the politics of the glitch.

Here, mestizaje becomes a design principle: a hybrid, decolonial logic of making that blends advanced robotics with traditional craft, obsolete machines, and the rhythms of human bodies. Movement is central—not as programmed automation, but as improvisation, dance, and tension. Atencio recalls the Colombian la Jonna dance, a ritual form that resists functionalist motion, as a metaphor for how humans and robots can co-perform—entangled in mutual adaptation, rather than one commanding the other.

Together, Atencio and McDaniel unpack how the architectural canon—shaped by American military-industrial legacies and Silicon Valley utopianism—can be decolonized through embodied knowledge, non-linear feedback, and the unlearning of Western binaries. They explore what it means to code with one’s voice, to choreograph through error, and to trust emergent behavior over deterministic scripts.

Atencio’s “robotic translations” are exactly that: translations across systems, materials, cultures, and ways of knowing. They carry meaning from one context to another—not to flatten difference, but to expose it, to inhabit it. These are acts of cultural hacking that embrace friction, failure, and feedback as part of the design process. This episode explores what emerges when robots are not tools of control, but collaborators in a messy, bodily, entangled world.

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel sits down with independent researcher Evelyn Meynard to uncover the forgotten legacy of Chilean modernist Emilio Duhart. From his early years in remote Cañete to working under Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, Duhart’s journey defies the canon of modern architecture—and reveals a rich, symbolically charged Latin American modernism rooted in myth, memory, and political rupture.

There are names you expect to find in the story of modern architecture—Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer. And then there are the names you have to go looking for. Emilio Duhart is one of those names.

Born in remote Cañete Chile, Duhart studied at Harvard, worked under both Gropius and Le Corbusier, and went on to design one of the most symbolically charged buildings in Latin America: the United Nations ECLAC building: the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean headquarters in Santiago. And yet—outside Chile, his name barely registers.

This week, I’m joined by Evelyn Meynard—independent researcher and author of Re-Imagining Modern Architecture: Emilio Duhart 1940–1970. Her book, published by Actar, is part biography, part excavation, part act of repair. And it arrives at a time when the Global South is being reframed not as architectural periphery—but as a site of poetic, ecological, and political intelligence.

What Evelyn brings forward isn’t just a forgotten architect. She traces a deeper story—about memory, materiality, silence, and design as a cultural language. Through Duhart’s eyes and journals, she takes us inside Le Corbusier’s atelier in Paris where he worked side by side with the likes of Iannis Xenakis, Balkrishna Doshi, and others.

We talk about modernist adobe–not concrete–houses for the Santiago elite in the 1940s. We explore how Duhart was thinking about sustainability and accessibility long before those terms became mainstream—designing passive water systems, integrating landscape and climate into his buildings, and proposing electric transit for the elderly and disabled—decades ahead of his time. We’ll also examine the haunting what-if of his master plan for Santiago: a pedestrian-first, ecologically attuned greenbelt capital that was never built. And yes—we’re going to talk about how Evelyn’s earliest memory of modernism came not from a textbook, but from a school she attended as a child, unknowingly designed by Duhart himself.

According to Meynard, When Brasilia was inaugurated, many Europeans came to the inauguration, even Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. But soon, a series of negative articles from architectural magazines in Europe and North American quickly undercut the achievements of Latin American modernism. She contends that, until the 21st century, few talked again about Latin American architecture.

This episode is about more than buildings. It’s about the work of remembering—of rebuilding the archive—and of asking who gets written into the story of our cities, and who gets left out.