Aiala Samula Lopez

aiala@hapticarchitects.com

Aiala is a Part 1 Architectural assistant at Haptic, with an interest in designing architecture that acts as a form of advocacy and social storytelling. Her aim is to continuously craft an awareness of how the built environment shapes people’s access, agency, and sense of belonging.

With a multidisciplinary approach to design, her final research project at The Bartlett was presented as a documentary, utilising her interest in film and photography. It explored the link between policy and the right to the city’s infrastructure. The building she designed sought to create a counter-narrative to the overlooking of PHV drivers in the transport sector. She then developed a booklet dissecting it as part of a proposed ‘Driven to Rest’ initiative. Her essay on this research was published in the first edition of UCL Changemaker’s ‘Transformative Voices’. Similarly, in previous years, her hand drawings acted as a communicative tool to construct human-led narratives of architectural processes. Focusing on Basque cultural preservation she expressed her work as a hand bound storybook to increase the accessibility of the research.

At Haptic, Aiala is working on a range of masterplan projects and will be working on a research project for Haptic as part of her final year on the MSci Architecture course at The Bartlett.