Alejandra Rivera Zamacona <3
Barcelona + Tijuana

Architect, designer, and artist — border girl at heart.

I blend web development, data visualization, and creative direction with AI agents and automation.

Based between Barcelona and Tijuana. Led multidisciplinary teams across Europe, North America, and South America.

PROJECTS

Alejandra C. Rivera Zamacona (Contact)

Born 1995, Tijuana, México.

Currently finishing a Master in Design for Emergent Futures at IAAC and Elisava (Barcelona), I'm a design researcher and architect who blends AI, data visualization, and web development with the materiality of the built environment — open to collaborations, research, and full-time opportunities.

Nationality: Mexican
Languages: Spanish, English

Education

• 2025 – 2026

  Master in Design for Emergent Futures
  ELISAVA - Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), Barcelona

• 2015 – 2020

  Bachelor of Architecture
  Universidad Iberoamericana CDMX-Tijuana, Tijuana, México

• 2018

  Academic Exchange
  Universidad Católica de Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina

• 2013 – 2015

  Introduction Program to Architecture and Design
  Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Tijuana, México

Work Experience

Get in touch

• Email aleriverazz@outlook.com
• GitHub github.com/aleriverazz
• LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/alejandra-rivera-zamacona-610a37187
• Instagram @zama.kona
• Tattoo Work @riveraazz

Location

BARCELONA, Catalunya, Spain

TIJUANA, Baja California, Mexico

Availability

Currently available for freelance and collaborative projects.
Response time: 1–2 business days.

Fog Harvest

This project, developed in collaboration with Estudio Santander&Lunaa, is a work-in-progress web-based simulation tool for air and fog harvesting that visualises real-time wind, humidity, and terrain data using OpenMeteo APIs, MapTiler maps, and a 3D wind-tunnel model powered by WebGL2. The current implementation allows users to upload custom 3D models (GLB/GLTF/OBJ/STL) and analyse airflow via a particle-based simulation, but it suffers from API failures (IP-based blocking/CORS), performance lag (too many particles, inefficient wind field interpolation), and rendering issues (WebGL2 not always supported, MapTiler key instability).

Next steps include migrating to browser geolocation + the OpenMeteo forecast endpoint, adding WebGL2 fallbacks, reducing particle count, implementing a Leaflet backup map, and optimising the simulation with web workers and Draco compression to ensure smooth, reliable performance across devices.

Website: Fog Harvesting

Year
2026

Location
Tijuana, Mx / Barcelona, ES

Office
Estudio Santander&Lunaa

Role
Web Developer

Tools
AI Models, WebGL2, OpenMeteo APIs

Status
Ongoing

Website Design

Tattoo Studio required a modern, conversion-focused shopping website to sell their products online. They currently have no digital presence (or an outdated one) and need a platform that builds trust, simplifies the checkout process, and reflects their brand identity.

Year
2026

Location
Barcelona, ES / Cork, IE

Role
Web Developer

Tools
JavaScript, HTML, CSS

Client
Tattoo Studio

Status
Ongoing

Monster Fantasies

From pop culture to urban theories — how can we fabricate new realities from the potential of the abnormal?

Monsters always return. But where do they come from? Anxieties about a broken future permeate pop culture, which has always anticipated what is globally happening. Monsters hide between us, present but unseen. This project explores the collision of digital, physical, and geographical edges — where are monsters being manufactured?

It investigates the fantasies of horror-rooted cities, where dark counter-cultural spaces signal new possibilities. Breaking from Mark Fisher's proposal, there are still places where you can dream — not outside neoliberalism, but on its edges.

Made at IAAC-Elisava MDEF Masters Project.

Year
2026

Location
Barcelona, Spain

Role
Master Thesis: Research and Design Development

Tools
Ongoing

Status
Ongoing

MDEF Fest Museography

Description coming soon.

Year
2026

Location
Barcelona, ES

Role
Team Leader

Tools
Ongoing

Team
MDEF Class

Status
Ongoing

Craft and Object Research

A fieldwork research trip to Senegal investigating the intersection of handcraftsmanship, cultural dynamics, and social structures. The inquiry focused on local making practices, material knowledge transmission, and community-led production systems. By engaging directly with artisans and observing daily social interactions, the research explored how traditional crafts embody collective values, negotiate contemporary pressures, and suggest alternative models for emergent futures. Key insights inform design strategies rooted in situated knowledge, relational ecologies, and resilient socio-cultural infrastructures.

Pictures by Fab Lab Barcelona as part of MDEF 2026.

Year
2026

Location
Senegal

Role
Student/Researcher

Tools
Hands on Workshop Researcher

Status
Completed

Echo of Mind

Echo of Mind — Collective Archive is a web-based speculative interface that explores human connection through a subconscious state. The project positions itself as a collective archive, inviting users into a liminal space where memory, emotion, and shared experience converge. With a minimalist, atmospheric presentation and a cryptic reference to "Connecting to Pi…", the interface suggests a bridge between the rational and the intuitive, the individual and the collective. The project probes how subconscious landscapes can be collectively navigated, documented, and reanimated—raising questions about what it means to share an interior world.

Made at Fab Lab Barcelona as part of MDEF 2026.

Project Page: Echo of Mind

Year
2026

Location
Barcelona, Spain

Role
Web Developer / Code Contributor

Team
Hannah Peevey, Antonio Garfe

Tools
Raspberry Pi, Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AI LLM Model

Status
Completed

Material & Graphic Research

An investigation into the intersection of sustainable biomaterials and risographic printing techniques. This research explores how bio-based inks, papers, and substrates can be integrated with the distinctive layering, texture, and color registry of risography. Through material experimentation and print tests, the work examines questions of ecological responsibility, tactile quality, and visual expression—seeking alternatives to conventional petrochemical-based print processes while preserving the idiosyncratic charm of risograph output.

Year
2026

Location
Barcelona, Spain

Role
Research

Tools
Bio-based inks, papers, substrates, riso printing

Status
Ongoing

Mochi

Mochi is a recreation of a nostalgic form — the Tamagotchi — but reframed as a mirror. Instead of teaching you to care for a creature, Mochi reflects back how you care for yourself. The neglect patterns, the check-ins, the feeding and sleeping inputs are proxies for your own relationship with rest, nourishment, and attention. It sits at the intersection of physical computing, critical design, and the question of what technology asks of us emotionally.

Made at Fab Lab Barcelona as part of MDEF 2026.

Website: Mochi Project

Repository: Mochi Repo

HackMd Document: Mochi HackMd

Year
2026

Location
Barcelona, ES

Role
Design

Tools
Arduino IDE, Claude AI

Team
Hannah Peevey, Agnese Raimondi, me

Status
Completed

Analysis of a Heartbreak

"my brain is a haunted archive of useless information"

Many people question how we deal with intimacy in the digital age. But rather than this, Analysis of a heartbreak, a personnel inquiry, questions, how do we deal with a heartbreak in a Post COVID world? Because what can even be more intimate than the silence and the absence not in death, but in life with someone once you shared a life together?

I find myself questioning what constructs an intimate bond with someone? What is love in a neoliberal world? As Zizek describes it, "love is directed toward one person above all others, not a universal feeling."

And, really, can an IA bot help go through it all?

Year
2025

Location
Barcelona, Spain

Role
Researcher

Tools
AI Model, Adobe Ps, Ai, Id, Excel, CapCut

Status
Completed

Nuevo Centro de Gobierno

A conceptual urban proposal transforming approximately 22 hectares of fragmented public land into a civic-ecological system. The project reimagines water as urban infrastructure linking ecologies with the city and its citizens. The riparian area serves as the structural spine of the public space system, featuring shaded pedestrian paths designed for safety and thermal comfort during Tecate's hot summers. The civic center, strategically positioned between parks, incorporates water elements that regulate microclimate and enhance comfort. By reconfiguring the relationship between the river and the city, the proposal activates local economies, community cohesion, and key ecological functions, consolidating a new urban center as both a dorsal spine and a meeting ground for inclusive urban life.

Year
2025

Location
Tecate, México

Office
Estudio Santander&Lunaa

Role
Architect

Tools
Autocad, Rhino, Adobe Ps, Ai, Id, Excel

Status
Ongoing

Proposal: Mexico Pavilion

This pavilion serves as an operational diagram. Architecture has always engaged with available technologies shaped by a cosmological imaginary—today, the planetary imaginary: a global infrastructure (satellites, data centers, submarine cables, ports) that allows us to read our territory and future. These sensory apparatuses construct reality rather than merely representing it. However, this infrastructure carries asymmetrical social and spatial consequences, particularly for the Global South, which bears its environmental and social costs. Drawing on the architectural concept of poché—the unused space within walls, the void, the unsaid—the project identifies a "gap" or "black box" of computation. Informed by Ramón Amaro's theory of technological marginalization, this gap becomes a site of possibility: to delineate erased stories, invisibilized worlds, and alternative imaginaries. The pavilion delineates in its pochés the potential for technodiversity and asymmetrical practices, guiding us toward constructing other worlds beyond existing power dynamics.

Year
2024

Location
México

Office
Estudio Santander&Lunaa

Role
Architect

Tools
Rhino, CautCad, Adobe Ps, AI, Id

Status
Completed at National Competition

A Story of Fluid Kinship: Rethinking Our Connection with Water

Speculative project, originating from a 2020 mask-design course on the Digital Futures, draws on Astrida Neimanis's hydrofeminism to rethink water not as a resource but as a vital component of identity and memory. Set in 2100, with rising sea levels transforming familiar landscapes, the project imagines a biological outgrowth—a hybrid body formed from selected waters sourced from our organisms: Primary Waters (ancestral), Original Waters (birth), and Inner Water (information technology).

A mask evolves from water as an information medium, embodying a fantastical, purplish, humanoid being resembling a nymph. Within its biological sprouts lies encoded genetic data, granting access to lost histories obliterated by catastrophic flooding. Entities serve both respiratory functions and as information units, transforming water blobs into data. The project explores how memory, history, and technology can be redefined through our relationship with water, urging reconsideration of our place within the ecological continuum.

Year
2024

Location
Tijuana, México

Based on
Digital Futures: Bio-Inspired Mask Design Workshop (2020)

Workshop Leader
Behnaz Farahi

Tools
Rhino, Grasshopper, Adobe Photoshop

Status
Completed

AI Architecture Studies

A speculative exploration of AI-generated imagery as a tool for architectural ideation. This project investigates how MidJourney—a text-to-image generative model—can expand the boundaries of architectural form, spatial composition, and imaginative worlds. Through iterative prompting and curation, the work probes questions of style, typology, materiality, and atmosphere beyond conventional design workflows. It examines AI's capacity to produce unexpected spatial configurations, hybrid morphologies, and alternate realities, positioning machine learning not as a replacement for human creativity but as a collaborative partner in envisioning new architectural imaginaries. The outcome is a visual archive of speculative spaces that challenge normative approaches to form and representation.

Year
2018–2025

Location
Tijuana, México

Role
Architect

Tools
MidJourney

Status
Completed

INTIMA

Intima de-centers the privileged human and human-centric design logics, instead exploring territorial and morphological reorderings based on degrees of intimate-ness among xeno-entities (vulnerable non-human and human others). Drawing on Helen Hester's notion of autoselected groups beyond family—kinship, friendship, mates, lovers—Intima asks what kind of city can be organized from these xeno-families.

Using co-evolutionary algorithms within the TIOC system, the project generates map clusterings of intimate-ness intensities, serving as open guidelines for reordering territories and morphologies under the terms of each xeno-entity. This analysis identifies which infrastructures must change—and which should remain. Intima ultimately re-visions urban planning and architecture to provide safe infrastructures for the flourishing of intimate relations between xeno-entities.

Year
2021

Location
Venice, Italy (Virtual due to covid-19).

Role
Team Leader and Creative Director

Tools
Rhino, Adobe Packaging, Grasshopper, Video Edition

Collaboration
Estudio Santander&Lunaa and RMIT (Biennale Sessions)

Status
Presented

YEU

有[yeu] designs protocols to restructure territories by identifying diverse modes of coexistence and de-framing scales of dominion. The term, from ancient Chinese, expresses possession from "possess" to "being"—opposing human-centered property logics of exploitation. Focusing on Lake Baiyangdian (manipulated across dynasties, now fetishized for its green aesthetic), the project detects forms of coexistence to visualize its multiple paths of dominion.

It designs algorithmic structures that are not necessarily constructable, but function as guidelines, rules, or temporary laws for territorial organization. 有[yeu] seeks a less fragmented reality without privileges of dominance, revaluing how we operate beyond human existence alone.

Year
2021

Location
Venice, Italy (Virtual due to covid-19).

Role
Team Leader and Creative Director

Tools
Rhino, Adobe Packaging, Grasshopper, Video Edition

Collaboration
Estudio Santander&Lunaa and RMIT (Biennale Sessions)

Status
Presented

VINVISIBLE

Description coming soon.

Year
2021

Location
Venice, Italy (Virtual due to covid-19).

Role
Team Leader and Creative Director

Tools
Rhino, Adobe Packaging, Grasshopper, Video Edition

Collaboration
Estudio Santander&Lunaa and RMIT (Biennale Sessions)

Status
Presented

TIOC 2.0

The second iteration of TIOC Think Tank, presented at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2020-2021 as a continuation from 2018, explores possible logics for architecture and urbanism that engage with "de-framing" contemporary conditions and objects manifesting "the Same"—a pseudo-autonomous system that maintains homogenization and cancels out contingency. Xeno-entities (human and non-human) are proposed as contingencies to the Same, each constructing their own worlds. Design must reposition itself to detect and advocate for these other worlds, moving beyond human-centered solutions. The project focuses on re-appropriating technologies, particularly AI, toward re-visions of co-existence and stealthy tactical approaches for architecture.

Year
2019–2021

Location
Tijuana, México

Role
Team Leader and Creative Director

Tools
Research, Design, and Development

Status
Presented

Estación Chabacano

This project consists of interventions funded by a bank loan from the Chinese government to implement large-scale display screens around Mexico City Metro stations. Part of the 2019 Official Master Plan for the Metro system, the proposal followed extensive research on metro history, public spaces, passenger flow, and peak hours. Chabacano station was selected as the case study, as it serves as an intersection of Lines 2, 8, and 9, connecting four delegations.

With official permission, a survey documented the station's three levels: a public library ("Benito Juárez"), a cultural center, an administrative center, and commercial spaces on level +1. The intervention addresses multiple focal points: Inclusivity, Identity Project, Public Spaces for Art and Culture, Sensory Experience, Monetization, Sustainability, Service Spaces, and a modernization initiative promoting intelligent spaces and mass information dissemination.

Year
2019

Location
Ciudad de México

Role
Architect Intern

Tools
GIS, Autocad, Rhino, Adobe Package

Status
Completed

Architecture Visualization

A portfolio of architectural representation work spanning diverse project types and geographies—from housing and commercial developments in Tijuana, Mexico, to landscape design projects in Córdoba, Argentina. The work employs 3D rendering, isometric illustration, and digital visualization techniques to communicate spatial ideas, material qualities, and atmospheric conditions. Renders explore lighting, context, and user experience, while isometric drawings distill complex programs into clear, diagrammatic compositions. Together, these visualizations serve as both design tools and narrative devices, bridging technical accuracy with expressive representation across cultural and climatic contexts.

Year
2018–2025

Location
Tijuana, Mx

Role
Architect / Visualizer

Tools
Rhino, Adobe Package

Status
Ongoing

TIOC

TIOC is a laboratory developing fair cities through rigorous investigation of contemporary conditions, building strategies for communities, NGOs, governments, and corporations facing new technologies. The project delves into algorithmic reality—abstract yet impactful on material reality—proposing an open system that, based on commitments to an ideal, calculates with human intuitive intelligence to enable emancipation infrastructures. The "Temporary Infrastructure of Commitments" is a transformative framework for governance and urban design that transcends conventional paradigms by identifying fissures within existing systems. Using Blockchain 2.0, it shifts from consensus-based to commitment-based algorithms to decentralize power, reduce polarization, and enhance participation. Commitments function as dynamic, interconnected intentions driving continuous evolution. The adaptive architecture responds in real-time to user interactions, advocating for a radical rethinking of urban planning that prioritizes collective aspirations and emancipatory outcomes toward a more equitable and imaginative future.

Year
2017–2018

Location
Tijuana, MX / Venice, Italy

Role
Researcher

Tools
Rhino, Grasshopper, Adobe Package

Status
Presented

Casa Costa Ligur

A residential remodel project in Tijuana, developed independently as a freelance commission. The intervention focused on reconfiguring interior spaces to improve functionality, natural light, and material coherence within an existing house. Working within a modest budget and local construction constraints, the project prioritized adaptive reuse of existing elements, strategic demolition, and the integration of simple, durable finishes. The outcome balances practical needs with a restrained spatial quality, demonstrating how freelance, small-scale interventions can meaningfully transform everyday domestic environments.

Year
2018–2019

Location
Tijuana, Mx

Role
Architect

Tools
Autocad, Rhino, Adobe Ps, Ai, Id

Status
Completed

Architecture Drafting

A body of drafting work developed for projects across Baja California, ranging from conceptual architectural design to executive-level documentation for construction permits. The deliverables include detailed floor plans, sections, elevations, structural and MEP coordination drawings, as well as permit sets compliant with local building regulations. This drafting practice bridges early design intent and technical feasibility, ensuring accuracy, clarity, and regulatory readiness. From residential remodels to commercial interiors, the work supports builders, clients, and municipal approvals throughout all phases of project execution.

Year
2020

Location
Tijuana, Mx

Role
Architect

Tools
Autocad, Rhino, Adobe Ps, Ai, Id

Status
Completed