Ignacio G. Galán

His scholarship as a historian of modern design and architecture has unfolded along two lines of inquiry. The first examines the architectures of nationalism and belonging, anchored by his first book, Furnishing Fascism: Modernist Design and Politics in Italy, and extended through curatorial projects and ongoing research on migration.

The second investigates diverse interdependencies between disability and design, particularly as they unfold within the domestic space, understood as a privileged framework of normalization and a site of design and social experimentation—concerns that animate his second book project, currently in progress, titled Independent Living, Care, and Labor: Disability Histories of Housing and Domesticity.

The designs of his office [igg-office for architecture] focus on housing and public facilities and bring to the fore questions of belonging, care, and disability. His work has been awarded in several competitions, including the First Prize for the New Velodrome in Medellín and the Second Prize for the Beti Jai Stadium in Madrid. A number of recent projects address different destabilizations of housing to address diverse networks of support and coalitions in New York and Madrid, including “Beyond-the-Family Kin,” “Another Seebed,” and “Camp Alliances” (all featured in different publications including Architectural Record, AD, dwell, AN, Bauwelt, and Plot). His design work unfolds through different collaborations, most consistently with Ozaeta Fidalgo Architects in Madrid and The Open Workshop in Oakland.

Galán's design speculations additionally take advantage of different exhibition platforms, with projects including “Fragments of Disability Fictions” (with David Gissen and Architensions) for the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2025, curated by Florencia Rodriguez; “Your Restroom is a Battleground” (with Matilde Cassani, Iván L. Munuera, and Joel Sanders) and “The Restroom Pavilion” (with Cassani and Munuera) for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, by invitation of the general curator Hashim Sarkis; and "Aging Against the Machine" (with The Open Workshop and Karen Kubey) for the national juried show Reset curated by Barry Bergdoll and Juliana Barton at the Center for Architecture in New York.

Galán teaches both undergraduate and graduate studios, seminars, and lecture courses on a diverse range of topics including housing, disability cultures, migration, globalization, and curatorial practices. He has developed collaborative studios with the UNAM in Mexico City and has received an Andrew Mellon Foundation grant for courses focusing on spatial inequality sponsored by the Center for Spatial Research, Columbia University, as well as the Inclusive Pedagogy Fund, Barnard College. His courses rehearse different media and formats including architectural drawing, research papers, mapping, graphic novels, videos, and websites among others. He frequently collaborates with the Empirical Reasoning Center and the IMATS at Barnard. In 2024 he received the Tow Award for Innovative and Outstanding Pedagogy.

The theoretical underpinnings supporting a number of his studios concerned with questions of disabilities and assistance as well as the studio work developed in them have been published in the Journal of Architecture Education. 

Galán is also a historian of architecture education and is a member of the research project Radical Pedagogies. He has co-curated its exhibition at the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale and at the 2014 Venice Biennale, where it was awarded a Special Mention of the jury. He is one of the editors of the eponymous volume (Graham Foundation Grant 2019, MIT Press 2022). 

SCHOLARLY MONOGRAPHS

—Furnishing Fascism: Modernist Design and Politics in Italy Between the Two World Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025), 344 pages


EDITED VOLUMES

—Radical Pedagogies, co-edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, Anna-Maria Meister (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022), 416pp.

—After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit, co-edited by Lluis A. Casanovas, Ignacio G. Galán, Carlos Mínguez, Marina Otero, Alejandra Navarrete (Zurich: Lars Muller, 2016), 400pp.


ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

— "Disabled Domesticities and the Politics of Bathrooms: Architectural Enactments of Interdependence," Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common, Brittany Utting ed. (New York: Routledge, 2023)

— "Furnishing Italian Colonialism: 'Nomad' Interiors and the Habitations of the Empire," modernism+modernity 30.4 (Fall, 2023), 681-717.

—“Unlearning Ableism: Design Knowledge, Contested Models, and the Experience of Disability in 1970s Berkeley,” Journal of Design History n.36:1 (March, 2023), 73-92.

—"Disabled Practices for the Architectures of the Countercollapse," Journal of Architectural Education 76.2 (October, 2022), Pedagogies for a Broken World, eds. Jay Cephas, Igor Marjanović, Ana Miljački, 152-160.

—"Furnishing a Nation” in Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture, Denise Costanzo and Andrew Leach ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 197-210.

—“Building Simultaneity in Fascist Italy: Film, Furniture, and the Reframing of the Nation,” Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians 80.2 (June 2021), 182-201.

—“Circulate! Architecture’s Language as an Instrument for Circulation,” ARQ. 96 (2017), 2-17.

—"Provisional Simultaneity" in Space Caviar ed. SQM: The quantified home (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014), 156-163.

—“Radical Pedagogies: Re-imagining Architecture’s Disciplinary Protocols,” co-authored with B. Colomina, E. Kotsioris, A-M. Meister, in Materia Arquitectura n.14 (2016), 32-45, 102-107.

—"In Pursuit of a 'Life Change:' Pedagogical Experiences, Poetic Occupations and Historical Frictions," in Building Cultures Valparaiso (Lausanne: EPFL Press and Routledge, 2015), 45-57. 

—“Radical Pedagogies: Educating Change,” co-authored by  B. Colomina, I. G. Galán, E. Korsioris, A-M. Meister, in Quaderns d'Arquitectura i Urbanisme, 267 (2015), 81-86.

—"Radical Pedagogy," co-authored by B. Colomina, E. Choi, I. G. Galán, A-M. Meister, Architectural Review, The Education Issue (Sept. 2012), 78-81.