ARCHITECTURE
Isabel Nicole Limpo
Isabel Nicole Limpo
Licensed Architect
Madrid, Spain
isabel.nicole.fl@gmail.com
+34 635158905
I am Isabel Nicole, a 26-year old Filipina architect who recently graduated from IE University in Spain, in search for the convergence of profound meaning, innovation, beauty, and social impact in architecture. I am an open-minded, persistent hard-worker constantly striving to uncover and ask the important questions and explore the fruitful paths they lead to.
My passion for architecture was sparked in 2016, when I designed and built a playground for a community in need in the Philippines, in collaboration with a social housing organisation, Habitat for Humanity. This project helped me realise my determination to work communities in need, and to introduce innovative and evolving technologies, sustainable architecture and a healthier way of living through the influence of inhabited spaces. I am looking forward to working with people with similar passions and from different backgrounds and expertise, as I believe that there is something to be learned from everyone and everything.
It is my belief that throughout history, architecture has been one of humankind’s most distinct, lasting and transcending footprints. Today it is in the architect’s capability and responsibility to sculpt the footprint our society dwells within and will eventually leave behind. I am therefore determined to gain as much experience and knowledge as I can from working with the most amazing people and studios all around the world.
• YACademy: Off-Site Technologies for Architecture - Online (Postgraduate) November 2024 - March 2025
• Gritnova Global Campus: Sustainable AI for Architecture - NY, USA (Postgraduate) June 2023 - August 2024
• IE University - Segovia, Spain ; Madrid, Spain (Licensure Bachelor’s Degree) September 2017 - June 2022
• University of Queensland - Queensland, Australia (Bachelor Exchange Program) July 2019 - November 2019
WORK EXPERIENCE
HUMANITARIAN / SOCIAL WORK
• San Mateo Typhoon Outreach, Project Leader: 2016 - 2017
• Anjali House Workshop, Cambodia, Volunteer: 2015
• Typhoon Haiyan Outreach, Quezon City, Project Leader: 2013-14
• MWS Soup Kitchen and Clothes Drive, Volunteer: 2011 - 2012
REALIZED PERSONAL PROJECTS
• Backyard Landscape Design (freelance employment)
Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A., 2020
• Navotas Playground (in partnership with Habitat for Humanity) Navotas Community, Philippines, 2016
• Grupo Dvos, Project Architect, Interior Designer
Malaga; September 2023 - May 2024
• Alicia López-Izquierdo Botín, Freelance Architect
Madrid; August 2021 - August 2022
• AGi Architects Madrid, Architectural Intern
Madrid; May 2021 - November 2021
• Design Lab, IE University, Architectural Intern
Segovia; January 2018 - June 2018
OTHER INFORMATION
• Software Skills:
AutoCad
Rhinoceros
Revit
Photoshop
Illustrator
InDesign
Lumion
Enscape
Unreal Engine V-Ray
Adobe Premiere
Microsoft Excel
• Languages:
English - Native
Filipino - Native Spanish - Intermediate
German - Beginner
• Other Skills/Interests:
Social Work
Woodshop work
Model-making
Painting, Sketching
Public Speaking
Creative Writing
University Projects: Bachelor of Architecture (licensure degree)
11 07 08 10 09 06
Personal / Independently Realised Projects
Navotas Playground with Habitat for Humanity
Artistic Oasis:
Centre
Villa Chullera
Floating Staten City
Type: Urban, Cultural, Commercial
Location: Staten Island, New York City, USA
Scope: Sustainable Urban and Architectural Conceptualisation and Design
Feedback and Collaboration with Professionals from: BIG, Foster + Partners, AECOM
One of the most pressing effects of the climate crisis is the significant rise in sea levels, which threatens to displace millions by 2100. This presents the opportunity for an architectural intervention to address this displacement, in the context of Staten Island, New York. The intervention consists of a pumping station and botanical garden on Staten Island, a greenbelt along the coast, and the main part, the network of floating platforms spreading out on the ocean, housing the displaced and reclaimed city. The geometry of each platform is tyriangular, with curved corners to mitigate waves while maximising straight edges for wave energy conversion.
Main Promenade
(vineyard, orchard, constructed wetlands)
Outside of what we learn intentionally and intellectually, one of our most impactful teachers is our environment. A truly holistic education includes subconscious, environment-induced learning, and a holistic educational campus is one that embodies this and provides spaces and places that enable and encourage such osmotic learning. This campus demonstrates this through its two main elements: the NATURE and the ARCHITECTURE, both embodying agents of education. The nature and landscape exhibit the processes of a productive landscape and constructed wetland.
Floating Staten City
Educational Building:
Dynamic Architecture as a Passive Educator
The architecture, primarily cross-laminated bamboo, is composed regulation, and both symbolically and literally exposing and unveiling and learning.
of a structural grid using exposed wood-joinery techniques. Furthermore, the dynamic facade follows this same logic, and allows for light unveiling the building. Overall, the campus is a platform of demonstration, as these systems and processes are exposed for public observation
MODULAR REGENERATION
Type: Residential; Urban, Cultural, Commercial
Location: Via Tucidide, Ortica, Milan, Italy
Scope: Sustainable and Modular Design
Feedback and critique from: Nicola Scaranaro
An analysis of Milan’s district of Ortica unveils the neighbourhood’s evolution and constant transformation largely impacted by its thriving creative identity.
This regeneration project encompasses two residential buildings, with the proposed architecture sitting on the already existing structure. It utilises the existing structural grid as the base of modularity. The project embodies this modular and additive approach, and presents an architectural system that leaves room for customisation, adaptability and flexibility.
There are 7 base apartment module types, upon which an extension module can be added. Each base unit has 4 extension module variations, creating a total of 41 different apartment variations. This modular system reaches from the past to the future, sitting on a structure that has lived through past urban evolutions, and leaving room for additive interventions well into the future.
MODULAR REGENERATION
Creative Hub Ground Floor
Creative Hub Rooftop
3
Interior Walls
2 Partition Walls
1 Facade
4 Extension Module
TROPICAL ZEN VILLA
Type: Commercial Resort Villa (unbuilt)
Location: El Nido, Philippines
Scope: Concept Design and Visualisation
Nave Madrigal
Type: Residential
Location: Madrigal, Ávila, Spain
Scope: New-build: Architecture, interior design, construction
Nave Madrigal
Type: Residential
Location: Madrigal, Ávila, Spain
Scope: New-build: Architecture, interior design, construction
Villa Benalmádena
Type: High-end Residential
Location: Benalmádena, Málaga, Spain
Scope: Refurbishment: Architecture, interior design
Villa Punta Chullera
SECTION A-A’
Type: High-end Residential
Location: Costa del Sol Occidental, Málaga, Spain
Scope: New-build: Architecture, interior design, construction
ELEVATION D-D’
Villa Punta Chullera
Type: High-end Residential
Location: Costa del Sol Occidental, Málaga, Spain
Scope: New-build: Architecture, interior design, construction
Artistic Oasis: Arts and Cultural Cetnre
5th Year Thesis Studio (2022)
Type: Artistic Cultural Centre
Location: El Raval. Barcelona, Spain
Square Area: 4,000 square meters
The site is located in El Raval, outside the Cerda grid, close to the port. Over time the buildings on the plot were demolished due to regulatory reasons, with the exception of one building still standing. Today it remains a “no-man’s-land”, an in-between space being turned away from, but also being pulled in different directions, left with a lack of life and identity.
The site is situated between an area of monumental, governmental, institutional buildings and avenues, and a smaller scale residential and mixed-use neighbourhood. The proposed program is one of the arts, which can return the site to the people, and help it gain back its identity.
The site is one that needs to be addressed considering the approach of a pedestrian, being very sensitive to the human scale rather than a monumental, industrial or institutional one. Contrary to this, the existing surrounding programs related to the arts are all on the institutional level, where such activities are in the form of very rigid, curated experiences. The project therefore proposes to reawaken the arts within the neighbourhood through architecture that is sensitive to the human scale, and frames artistic moments outside of the walls of the rigid institution.
THRESHOLD: From monumentality to the reframing of artistic moments in the human scale
Urban Playground: Educational Hub
4th Year Studio (2021)
Type: Educational Centre
Urban Planning; Landscaping
Location: Chamartin. Madrid, Spain
Square Area: 60,000 square meters
Design Excellence Award
The Urban Playground is a hub fully dedicated to a well-rounded approach to education that provides equal opportunities for different socio-economic conditions. The site of the project is in the neighbourhood of Castilla (in the district of Chamartín), near the neighbourhood of Almenara (in the district of Tetuán). The project aims to tackle the distinct socio-economic divide between the neighbouring districts, by addressing the persistent issue of child poverty, through educational, social and recreational opportunities.
The nucleus of the hub is the school composed of the classrooms, creative pavilions and natural playground, which allow holistic learning through the nature of the architecture: the relationships between nature, structure and furniture encourage autonomy in the children’s interactions with the architecture, and incite their young minds to question the norm. The centralisation of the spectrum of activities within the hub creates a circulation of secure pedestrian commute within the site that allows for an equal opportunity for safe play and learning for all children. The project is organised in programmatic sections: the “tissue” (public, open, fluid spaces), the “cells” (public and semi-public buildings) and the “organs” (the classrooms, which are the core of the project).
Internal Convergence: Socail Housing Project
4th Year Studio (2020)
Type: High-density Housing
Location: Almenara. Madrid, Spain
The project responds to the fragmentation that the Covid-19 pandemic has imposed upon urban life. It provides refuge and convergence to the three spheres of life: the personal, the social and the professional spheres, which were laden with restrictions and torn apart by the difficulties of the pandemic.
Through a gradient of spaces that are fluid and continuous yet distinguishable, the units provide its residents with adequate spaces for each of these spheres. The ground level addresses the surrounding topography boldly, as it takes on the form of stepped landscape, which provides the residents and surrounding community with a productive landscape. A network of ramps sprawl the ground level, allowing for easyand deliberate access and circulation.
Elysian Horizon
