David López López

Biography

David López López received his Master Degree in Architecture in 2010 from the School of Architecture of Madrid (UPM), where he was also an assistant at the Structures Department for two years. He received an Advanced Masters Degree in Building Technology, specializing in structural design, from the School of Architecture of Barcelona (UPC) and an Advanced Erasmus Mundus Masters Degree in Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions from the Civil Engineering Schools at the UPC and the University of Minho.
After gaining professional experience in different architecture offices, he co-founded MAP13 Barcelona, which has been used as a platform to test and implement the results of academic research. One of his most recent and striking works within MAP13 is the free-form thin-tile vault “Brick-topia”, a multifunctional pavilion in Barcelona designed with the help of RhinoVault.
David received one of the ETH Zurich's Architecture & Technology PhD Fellowships in 2013 and a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) doc.mobility grant in 2016. His doctoral research within the Block Research Group had as its starting point the study of the structural behavior and assessment methods of tile vaults. David has experience in this field as a mason, designer, project manager and structural consultant. His PhD dissertation proposes the use of tile vaults as integrated formwork for concrete shells and presents the construction technique, conclusive experimental research for its validation and a reliable FE model for its structural analysis. Furthermore, a two-dimensional method for the design and structural assessment of such structures is developed and implemented computationally. The first steps and preliminary results in the three-dimensional approach to this method are also described.
After an SNSF postdoctoral fellowship at the UPC, he is now Assistant Professor at the Department of Architectural Technology in that university.