PORTFOLIO.
Omar Leon | Bachelor of Architecture | Cornell University
The work in this portfolio aims to use architecture and urban design as deliberate tools to connect vulnerable communities to the systems that structure urban life. It is rooted in informal growth, infrastructural inequity, and contested land, engaging conditions where access to water, housing, mobility, and public space is uneven or unstable.
Operating across territorial, neighborhood, and architectural scales, the projects link spatial systems rather than isolate buildings. Field research and mapping guide precise interven
tions that strengthen existing social and economic networks instead of replacing them. Infrastructure is treated as an active spatial and political medium capable of supporting equitable growth within rapidly changing cities
1 INFORMAL REVOLUTION
Fall 2025: Cornell University, B.Arch Thesis Advisors: Katharina
Kral, Catherine Chen
This thesis examines informal urbanization as a set of spatial and infrastructural practices rather than as a condition of deficiency. Through on-site observation, documentation, and sectional analysis, the work reads the informal city as an active system that organizes itself through experience, repetition, and environmental knowledge. Housing, infrastructure, and landscape are understood as interdependent, shaped by ongoing negotiation rather than singular interventions.
Focusing on the Quebrada Lima corridor, the project analyzes how water infrastructure can be reconfigured to address environmental risk while supporting everyday life at the household and neighborhood scale. By tracing the movement of wastewater, circulation, and material across the slope, the thesis situates architectural intervention within existing practices of construction and maintenance. Rather than proposing a finished solution, the work operates as a framework for incremental change, engaging informality as a productive and adaptive mode of urbanization.
History of Colombian Armed Conflict
Bogota City Growth History
City Section: Water and Topography as actors of Displacement
Mapping Informality: Mountains as Shelter
Self-Building Material Phasing Diagram
Chicken Coop and Pedestrain Path
Connectivity Through Water Infrastructure
Connection to the Formal city: Extension of Identity
Small Store, Material Collection site, and Chicken Coop
Bus Stop, Playground, and Convenience Store
Laundry Machine Rental, Beauty Salon, and Material Collection Site
Detail Model: Bus Stop, Playground, Convenience Store, and Pathway
Topographic Site Model
2 WATERSCAPES
Fall 2023: Cornell University, B.Arch Option Studio
Instructor: Gary Bates
This office to residential conversion at the heart of New York’s Financial District aims to use water as an element of change and rethink how we should inhabit skyscrapers. The ground floor embraces the flood as a resiliency tactic by creating a public space for water collection and a park when the flood is not present. Community activities are dispersed in the terraces and invite the public to explore the city vertically. The public housing units are subsidized through an aquaculture research system that utilizes the building’s plumbing and waste to generate fish. The redesign respects the iconography of the existing building and uses voids to suggest a possible future for skyscrapers and their responsibility to the larger urban context.
Aquaculture System Axonometric Aquaculture Process Diagram: Fish Farming Aquaculture Floor Plans
Ground Floor Plan: Privately Owned Public Space and Connection to Ferries Ground Floor Plan: Privately Owned Public Space and Connection to Ferries
Public Housing Plan Proposal Tower 1: Optimized Views and Living
Public Housing Plan Proposal Tower 2: Optimized Views and Living
3
RECLAIMING ALBINA'S LEGACY
Fall 2023: Cornell University NOMAS Student Design Competition Project Team Role: Design Co-Leader, Visual Representation Leader
[ All work shown is executed solely or in part by Omar Leon Competition Team Members: Omar Leon, Alejandra Siguenza, Valentina Sanz, Victoria Lee, Jeff Li, Jesus Mayen, Rhoda Ayele Advisor: Imani Day
2023 NOMA Barbara G. Laurie National Student Design Competition 1st Prize
In order to heal Albina’s fractured history, the mixed used block weaves a new tapestry into the landscape. Five healing pillars serve as the foundation of the design: medical health emerges in community spaces and building facades, healthy lifestyles are promoted through green roofs, resilient environmental systems can be seen through angled roofs for rainwater collection, and vibrant residences engage with businesses.
Albina’s History: Typology of the Block
Vertical Housing Typology: Live and Work
Mixed Use Distribution as Intertwined
Block Center Transformation: Healing
Block Center Transformation: Nightlife
Block Center Transformation: Shelter
4
MULTISPECIES COEXISTENCE
Spring 2025: Cornell B.Arch Option Studio
Instructor: Stephanie Lee
This proposal explores the design of a learning farm in Ithaca for Amanda David of Rootwork Herbals, conceived as a site for reimagining the relationship between land, labor, and multispecies coexistence. Through the lens of people’s movements that advocate for communal land care and collective labor, the project interrogates how architecture can act as a facilitator of mutual care between humans, animals, and the land itself. Sound and physical proximity become tools for fostering coexistence, with spatial strategies that prioritize sensory awareness and non-extractive occupation of the land.
Proposed Fauna and Flora Section
Mapping Species: Flora and Fauna
Multispecies Plans: Mixed Interactions
Building Section: Coexistence of Animals, Plants, Humans
Site Plan: Living, Working, Exchanging, Growing
5
LIBERTY CITY RE-IMAGINED
This public housing proposal focuses on the duality of domestic life in Liberty City, Miami by emphasizing the existing rituals of black and bohemian culture within the neighborhood and those activities held in the porch.Through the re-imagining and reconfiguration of existing housing units and the iron work that accompanies them, the design aims to re appropriate what is overlooked such as iron work and utilize it as a bridge between the body and the activities embedded in the community. The iron work and the units both adhere to the needs of its users and becomes the threshold between private and public spaces by stitching these existing activities and quilting them together into one community.
Spring 2023: Cornell B.Arch Option Studio
Instructor: Sydney Maubert
Axonometric of Proposal Re-Imagined: Activities of the Porch and the Block
Existing Porch Activities: Dialogue
Porch Activities Re- Imagined: Dialogue
Site Plan Proposed Block Re-Imagined
Existing Porch Activities: Leisure
Porch Activities Re- Imagined: Leisure
Community Duality Plan: Barbershop Fence, Domino Station, Artist Courtyard
Community Duality Plan: Disco Laundromat and Braiding Courtyard
Community Duality Section: Live and Work
Barbershop Porch
Apartment and Ironwork Chairs
Artist and Braider Porch
Detail Wall Section: Ironwork
Iron Work Activities Rationale
Barbershop
Nail Salon
Disco Laundromat
Art and Quilting
Apartment and Ironwork Chairs
Engulfed
Acrylic on Canvas
The House that Still Stood
Acrylic on Canvas
Los Frutos del Otro
Charcoal on Wood
Location: Miami, Florida
Designer: Sydney Maubert
Contribution: Large Scale Models
Materials: Wood, 3D Fillament, Matboard, Spray Paint, Plastic
This Exhibit is an acknowledgment of Miami’s Bahamian history and its vital ties to a larger cultural geography of Southern and Indigenous aesthetics. It draws upon Miami’s history of Bahamian laborers’ construction of Miami’s infrastructure on porous rock, and their present descendants’ influence on Miami Bass culture. In many ways, Miami’s Black and Indigenous communities are the instigators of Miami’s original architecture, infrastructure, and present culture. This work is interested in identifying a Miami architectural vernacular and uses its aesthetics as a possible solution to our swampland’s troubled reputation as being uninhabitable. It experiments with aesthetics of impropriety as a solution.
Queen of the Swamp
Omar Leon | B. Architecture | Cornell University