Olga Mesa

Olga Mesa is an architectural designer, researcher and educator. She is an Associate Professor at Roger Williams University, where she teaches design studios and digital representation and fabrication courses at undergraduate and graduate levels in the department of Architecture. Olga is interested in the accord between form, forces and performance and how this interaction has a physical manifestation in material systems.   Her primary research involves the investigation on how formal orders result from processes and contextual forces and how, with the inclusion of cultural forces, architectural form can be developed in an analogous manner to respond to a given context. Engaged in biologically-inspired design, Olga is also a research associate at Harvard MaP+S Group (Material Processes and Systems Group) and has collaborated with the Wyss Institute for biologically inspired engineering. Along with Professor Nathan Fash, Olga is a partner of Nuvola Studio where they integrate their research, teaching and professional projects.  They have published nationally and internationally and have projects in the United States, Colombia, Honduras and Mexico.

Olga has over two decades of experience as a designer and project architect in residential, commercial, and institutional projects. Her former professional experiences include being principal at 2StoryDesignBuild, associate at 3six0 Architecture, and a project manager/architect at Gensler and Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects. She achieved her accreditation in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) in 2002 with specialization in building design and construction. She has taught architectural studios and seminars at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Northeastern University (NEU), and at the Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial (UTE) where along with her students researched, designed, and built projects located in the Ecuadorian rainforest.

Olga earned her Master of Design Studies at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) within the Technology concentration in 2015, where she was recognized as Graduated with Distinction, and was the recipient of the prestigious Daniel Schodek Award for Technology and Sustainability for her thesis: “Anima: Choreographed Matter”. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Gold Medal for design excellence in 2000.