Juan Manuel Rois
Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design

Juan Manuel Rois holds a professional degree in Architecture from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina. He holds a master ‘s degree in Architecture (with concentration in Landscape Urbanism) from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a PH.D in Architecture and Urban Studies from the Universidad Católica de Chile.
Currently a Professor of Architecture at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Rois has taught at the School of Architecture of the University of Illinois at Chicago and at the Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of Michigan, where he has been appointed as Charles Moore Visiting Professor of Urban Design and as Eliel Saarinen Visiting Professor.
His initial Argentinian based practice, in partnership with Marcelo Villafañe, won the first prize at the National Competition for the Central Coastal Area of Rosario. Later collaborations with Diego Arraigada were awarded with the second prize at the International Ideas Competition for the Metropolitan Park of the Rosario-Victoria Bridge and with the third prize at the National Competition for the San Fernando Riverfront. His design work has been published and exhibited nationally and internationally. His theoretical essays have been published in various media, including Azure, Arquine, Plot and Summa + design magazines.
His PHD dissertation, entitled “The role of diagrams on the creative act of design processes”, explores the role that intermediate design artifacts play in design processes, that is, on how designers use representations to imagine, communicate, and transform ideas destined to become spatial dispositives and arrangements, and how this agency of design can operate at all scales of intervention, whether architectural or urban. His design pedagogy explores the creative and communicative role of diagrams and diagrammatic reasoning on the collective dynamics of design processes.