Dr Adriana Cobo Corey

Biography

Adriana Cobo Corey is an architect and educator with a doctorate in spatial practice. She works on creative social practice with projects sited within the urban public realm, focusing on the connection between taste and class in architecture and urban design. Adriana collaborates with under-represented groups in partnership with community organisations, corporations, and business and service providers. Her research inspects the role of designers as taste-makers, forefronting taste as a key though usually subdued issue, when working towards more equitable, diverse and sustainable built environments.

Her design-research focuses on the ethics of aesthetics and draws connections between notions of maintenance, ethics and joy in spatial practice. Adriana's projects are advanced on the premise ‘minimum budget maximum impact’. Her design methodologies are based on residency approaches that allow detailed observations of everyday dynamics on specific sites, and subsequent re-codifications of traditional codes of practice in architecture and urban design.

Adriana is the author of the book Mending Privately Owned Public Spaces: Works on Taste and Spatial Practice, Routledge, 2026. She contributed to the British Pavilion Catalogue of Practice for the Architecture Biennale 2021 with the text Reflecting on The Disappearing Garden, about her performance series The Disappearing Garden (2016-2018) sited in London’s Granary Square. Her short essay Is Ornament a Crime? – Observations for architects on the Colombian Narco-aesthetics (2008) has been published in various languages, including Spanish and Farsi. Her panoramic installations Panorama of a Room (2005-2007) and Drawing the City (2004-2009) have been exhibited in Colombia, the UK and Poland. Adriana received her doctorate degree from UAL in 2021 with the project Taste Untold: Critical Performance Practice and Contemporary Public Space, passed with no amendments. In her role as a subject leader on ethical practice for BA Architecture at Central Saint Martin's, Adriana has created The Ethical Table, a platform for furthering discussions, advancing agendas, developing curricula and making small scale projects on ethics in creative practice, with a focus on education, architecture and spatial practice.