The Territorial Design Lab reconnects cities with their wider geographies. We work across scales—from dense urban cores to remote areas—to turn the externalities of urbanization into opportunities for new forms of coexistence. Through research, design, and communication, our projects confront the environmental challenges of an increasingly planetary urban condition.

Today, urbanization is a territorial phenomenon. Around the world, cities have sprawled into spatial systems characterized by intricate interconnections between geographical, infrastructural, and biophysical conditions. Their functioning depends on the incessant flow of material resources, energetic supplies, and logistical chains. All these externalities create reciprocal relations between agglomerations and landscapes. As designers, our responsibility encompasses both.

Within this context, the Territorial Design Lab interrogates dominant metropolitan models and explores how to design urbanization’s reciprocal landscapes. Through a territorial prism, we tackle cities’ excessive energy consumption and CO₂ emissions, deficits in ecological services, and uneven access to housing and urban services by proposing alternative distribution of densities, centralities, and land uses. Beyond agglomerations, we conceive large-scale clean energy systems, the balance between human and non-human forms of life, and the sustainable access to material resources as territorial projects. They call for spatial structures connecting a diversity of human and non-human modes of living.

The Territorial Design Lab invites a different way of thinking about cities and geographies: to recognize ecological diversity, varied ways of living, and equitable access to resources as essential drivers of territorial imagination.

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Press & News

Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium opens at MUHBA as part of Barcelona World Capital of Architecture events, June 25, 2026

Roi Salgueiro Barrio receives HASS Award 2026

Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium opens at Galician Center of Contemporary Art (CGAC), Jan 8, 2026

Eume River Basin wins the 2025 Leventhal City Prize

Roi Salgueiro Barrio presents Decarbonizing Vallejo-i at Laguna-Mexico, Oct 30, 2025

Obradoiro 35: Paisaxes, edited by Roi Salgueiro, Manuel Bouzas, Maria Fandiño, and Teresa Táboas, presented at Fundación Laboral, Santiago de Compostela, Oct 10, 2025

Spanish pavilion demonstrates ‘another way of building’ at Venice Architecture Biennale, Dezeen, May 12, 2025

Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium: Discover the Spanish Pavilion Proposal at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Arch Daily, Jan 20, 2025

Roi Salgueiro Barrio and Manuel Bouzas Barcala interviewed for AV Proyectos: Economía Circular, Arquitectura Viva, Jan 9, 2025

Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium featured in Divisare

Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium featured in The Architects’ Journal

Roi Salgueiro Barrio Will Co-Curate the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2025, MIT MAD News, Oct 11, 2024

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Academic Articles

Roi Salgueiro Barrio, and Sasha McKinlay. “The Sea Wall and the Kampung: A Debate on Architectural Cosmotechnics.” Footprint : Delft School of Design Journal 18, no. 2 (2024).

Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “Reimaging Earth. Architecture and the Critical and Speculative Uses of Geovisualization.” City, Territory and Architecture 10, no. 1 (2023).

Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “Territorio y Urbanización: Aproximaciones al Espacio Mundial Post-Capitalista.” Revista de Filosofía 55, no. 154 (2023): 138–57.

Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “Maps Are Plans: Re-Evaluating Territorial Hermeneutics through Manuel de Solà-Morales’ Project of Description.” City, Territory and Architecture 9, no. 1 (2022).

Roi Salgueiro Barrio and Conor O’Shea. “Testing Planetary Urbanisation: Siberia’s Trans-Scalar Spatial Regime of Oil Production.” City, Territory and Architecture 9, no. 1 (2022).

Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “Territorial Challenges of Cosmopolitical Design,” in Technical Lands: A Critical Primer, Charles Waldheim and Jeffrey Nesbit, eds. (Berlin: Jovis, 2022).

Roi Salgueiro Barrio and Gabriel Kozlowsi. “Cutting the Earth: Seven Cases of the Planet in Section.” Log 51 (2021): 63–74.

Adrià Carbonell and Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “Reversing the Gaze: Metropolitan Voids as Structuring Elements of Stockholm’s Territory.” Architecture, city and environment 16, no. 46 (2021).

Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “Lazar Khidekel's Aero-cities and the Investigation of an Architecture for the World Scale,” in They Will Understand Us in 100 Years. Lazar Khidekel, Regina Khidekel, ed. (Minsk: National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, 2020).

Roi Salgueiro Barrio and Adrià Carbonell. “Complexity and Complication: Positions of the Object in Il Territorio Dell’architettura.” San Rocco 14 (2018).

Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “Una revisión crítica de la morfología territorial. Hacia un método de análisis urbano post-metropolitano,” in Ciudades y Formas Urbanas. Perspectivas Transversales. Volumen 1. Teorías, Historia Urbana y Metodologías Urbanísticas, Javier Monclús, and Carmen Díez Medina, eds. (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2018), 253–65.

Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “Photojournalism, and The difficult task of making public work in good faith.” San Rocco 14 (2018) "1966": 110–119.

Adrià Carbonell and Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “Notes on Aldo Rossi’s ‘Geography and History: The Human Creation’,” in Cartha—The Form of Form, Victoria Easton, Matilde Cassani, and Noura al Sayeh, eds. (Basel: Park Books, 2019).

Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “Birds Must Be Eliminated: Air Architecture and the Planetary Reenactment of the Modern Void.” Journal of Architectural Education 70, no. 2 (2016): 311–23.

Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “Micro, Partial, Parallel, (In) visible.” New Geographies 08 (2016). Harvard University Press.

Roi Salgueiro Barrio and Gabriel Kozlowski. “The World in the Architectural Imaginary.” New Geographies 08 (2016). Harvard University Press.

Roi Salgueiro Barrio, with Annya Chugh and Maynard Leon. “Petrified Metabolism as Urban Artifact. Tells, artificial topographies and the metabolism of vertical urbanism in the Khabur Basin, Syria.” New Geographies 06 (2014). Harvard University Press.

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Team & Collaborators

Roi Salgueiro Barrio, PI
Aurora Armental
Manuel Bouzas
Stefano Ciurlo
Hai Yi Blue Chan
Luis Díaz Díaz
Inge Geraldine Donovan
David Keith Pankhurst
Afreen Siddiqi

Clients & Partners

Ministerio de Vivienda y Agenda Urbana. Gobierno de España
MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism
Mota-Engil México
Fundación RIA
IaaC - Advanced Architecture Barcelona
Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism
Concello das Pontes
Diputación Provincial da Coruña
Colexio Oficial de Arquitectos de Galiza