Monica Lamela Blazquez (MS.Arch 21’) Receives Prestigious AIAS Research Honor Award

The American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) announced Monica Lamela Blazquez (MS.Arch 21’) as one of the winners of the 2021 AIAS Honor Awards for her thesis “Rave Assemblages: Itineraries of Leisure in Post-Franco Spain.” Lamela Blazquez was awarded with the prestigious Student Research Honor Award. Each year the AIAS honors individuals and groups for their exemplary work in areas such as leadership, collaboration, scholarship and service.

In the abstract, Lamela Blazquez says her thesis “focuses on La Ruta, a spontaneous rave itinerary that took place along the Spanish coast during the 1980s, in the context of a country that was exiting a thirty-six year long fascist dictatorship. Despite pioneering rave culture in Europe and having taken place during a culturally and socially significant time within the Spanish transition to democracy, La Ruta has been relatively unexplored, erased from most rave accounts and banalized locally, only to be remembered through stigmatized narratives of Spanish media.” She hopes that her thesis broadens the discussion on architecture, challenges the established research tools and forms of communication architecture historians often employ. 

Monica Lamela Blazquez attended the Department of Architecture’s History, Theory, and Society program as a Fullbright Scholar. She is an architect from Madrid currently living in LA, where she founded ThereThere: a collaborative architecture studio that fluctuates between design and research, conducted through a variety of multiscale projects, speculative drawings and countermapping.