About me

Hi, I am Mauro, from Madrid. 46 years old, happily married and exhausted father of 5 year old triplets.

This year I am enrolled in the Fab Academy as a remote student in the node of Fab Lab Leon. Here you will find a little background info about me.

My background

I feel I've been all my life learning, and now I realize I'd like to keep it that way. I love to see how things work, I am naturally curious about processes and practices, and being the son of an engineer gave me the opportinity to watch assembling and disassembling of staff since I can remember. To me, achieving any outcome is the logical result of the processes behind it. It's how, more than what; and ultimately, why.

In the personal side, I have also noticed that I must enjoy during learning processes, given the number I have gone through in the last ten years: from bass guitar to field hockey, through hand tool furniture making, back country skiing, cnc machining, mountaneering, programming, climbing, sketching and inline street skating.

I have been aware of the existance of Fab Labs and Maker Spaces since around 2012. But it wasn't until 2017 that I accidentally read Designing Reality, found CBA's HTMAA site and finally Fab Academy. And from there on, I knew that someday I would enroll the Fab Academy.

Previous and current work

I started working, while still in college and for a couple of years after graduation, at NietoSobejano Arquitectos, where I had the opportunity to learn and practice competition architecture. After that, I spent three years at BOD Arquitectura, focusing in offices and corporate buildings. Later, along with my wife, we stablished our own practice, and worked in every scale, from houses to big buildings.

In 2013, during a trip to London, I stumbled upon Unto This Last, a furniture shop that was able to sell and produce in a not-so-big at the time shop located in Brick Lane, downtown London. I inmediatly fell in love with the idea, contacted the owner and tried to replicate the concept in Madrid, naming the project manuk. It was a very small workshop, that remained open for five years, until 2019.

In 2017, I started teaching design at URJC, as an associate lecturer. The following year I joined the University with a full time position, as a visiting lecturer, teaching in the classes: Furniture Design, Models and Prototipes and Product Design.

I studied architecture at ETSAM, UPM(Madrid), where I graduated in 1999. A few years later, in 2012, I obtanied a Masters Degree, in BioClimatic Architecture and Eviromental Studies, at the same school. Since last year, I am pursuing a PhD in Visual Arts and Culture at URJC, which is the university where I am currently employed at.

The URJC Library is in the proccess of opening a Fab Lab to serve all the academic community, and I was lucky enough to be selected to enroll the Fab Academy this year. Thankfully, the management team is aware of the fact that, for a Fab Lab to be succesful, the fundamental need is build a strong team. I hope to be up to the task, and I'll give my best.