Rubén Gómez Gañán is a Colombian architect, researcher, and educator, and the founder of Práctica Popular, an award-winning archite cture practice based in Bogotá and New York. Since establishing the office in 2020, Gómez Gañán has built a body of work spanning architecture, landscape, research, hospitality, and cultural production across Colombia, Chile, the United States, and China. His practice expands the role of the architect beyond the design of buildings, engaging long-term processes of stewardship, local economies, and new relationships between people, territories, and more-than-human actors.
Through Práctica Popular, the built projects portfolio includes projects in rural contexts, including Casa Páramo (Bogotá, 2025), Casa Tres Pinos (Plattekill, 2024), Casa Caoba (Anapoima, 2023), and Refugio San Felipe (La Calera, 2021), as well as adaptive reuse projects in urban contexts addressing hospitality, like Casa Doce Hotel (Bogotá, 2026), navigating how architecture can be part of how we recycle structures over time. The studio has been recognized among Archello's Top 25 Architecture Firms in 2024 and 2025 and was named one of Architizer's Top Colombian Architecture Offices.
Alongside practice, Rubén is an instructor at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, where his teaching and research investigate architecture as a form of situated knowledge that can foster caring, reciprocity, and coexistence. His work develops situated design methodologies grounded in territorial intelligence, climate and material ecologies, and architecture's capacity to respond to contemporary social and environmental challenges. His current research explores architecture's role in responding to the inhabitation of rural areas in Latin America in the post-conflict period, while continuing to advance design-research through Práctica Popular's projects across the Americas.
Gómez Gañán received a Bachelor of Architecture from Universidad de los Andes and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University GSAPP, where he was awarded the Percival & Naomi Goodman Fellowship and the William Kinne Fellows Traveling Prize. In 2026, he was named one of SCA Colombia's 40 Under 40 for his contributions to contemporary architectural practice, research, and education.