Germán Pallares Avitia is an architect, researcher, and professor. He currently is an Assistant professor and Graduate Program Director at the Department of Architecture at RISD. He holds Master’s in Architecture from the UPC/ETSAB, and the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in History and Theory of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

Germán was born and raised in Ciudad Juárez, Chih (México). Growing up in the pre-NAFTA, pre-911 Mexican side of the Cd. Juárez/El Paso border, Germán became interested in questions of culture, citizenship, nationalism, and transnationalism, interests reflected in his current scholarship. German’s work is interdisciplinary, drawing on fields such as Border, Chicano Studies, Environmental History, and Urbanism, and explores Post-colonial and De-colonial concepts that refine understandings of territories, nations, identity, and migration as they relate to urban and architectural conditions.

German’s PhD dissertation Life on the Border: Constructing the México-US Borderlands, 1961-1971, brings into the architecture field a humanized history of the governmental urban and architectural projects that aimed to create more connected borderlands in the 1960s.