Carlos Gómez and Eva Álvarez are architects and professors at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, where they have taught for many years. Since 1991, they have also run their office, “Gómez+álvarez Arquitectes,” while simultaneously caring for their family unit as a married couple with three children. From the very beginning, they understood that their academic work should be centred on students’ learning, their professional activity should rely on positive action, and their personal lives should nurture their families. Over the years, they have managed to address these three spheres of work and life simultaneously.
Although this was not originally planned, their personal stance has consistently guided their activity, shaping what they now consider their strongest value: their commitment to a different way of understanding architecture, urban planning, and academia. Today, this position is widely recognised as the gender approach to architecture and urbanism, a perspective they fully embrace. They are also interested in photography as a tool for analysis and writing (and reading) as a way to understand reality. From this standpoint, they conceive of their time as a continuum in which both paid and unpaid work intertwine, producing unexpected connections that enrich their professional approach—what they call their “work timeline.”
As a professional activity in gómez+álvarez arquitectes, they have developed the construction of several buildings that incorporate the gender perspective, such as the Town Hall and Auditorium of Massanassa (Valencia). In addition, as assessors for gender mainstreaming, they have provided advice for effectively incorporating the gender perspective in the General Structural Plan of Castelló and prepared the Gender Impact Assessment Report commissioned by the City Council of Castelló (2017). They were also commissioned to produce the Urban Quality Guidelines of Valencia by the City Council of Valencia (2018), as well as to participate in the DUSI Strategy of Castelló (2018). More recently, they elaborated the “Guide to Incorporate the Gender Perspective in Urban Planning in the Valencian Community,” commissioned by the Directorate General of Urban Planning of the Generalitat Valenciana (2020). This Guide was a finalist for the CSCAE awards in 2022. They have also advised on gender mainstreaming in AUMSA’s Housing Plan 2022, commissioned by the European Investment Bank, and developed the “Reference Guide for Gender Mainstreaming in Social Housing” (2023) for the same institution.
In addition to their professional work, they have also developed an extensive cultural and research activity. In 2010, they organised the exhibition On Stage! Women in Architecture in Hannover (2011) and Valencia (2012), and contributed to its presentation in Vienna (2014). Since 2014, they have organised several edit-a-thon sessions on Women in Architecture in collaboration with Un día | Una arquitecta, a blog to which they are contributors. They organised the international seminar Women in Architecture in 2015, the international survey Women in Architecture in 2016, and the Women Now lecture series in 2018. They led a workshop at the Venice Biennale in 2018 and actively participated in the activities of AULAhna (2014–2018), where they invited prominent architects such as Anne Lacaton, Momoyo Kaijima, Yui Tezuka, Anupama Kundoo, and Yasmin Shariff, among others.
They have also contributed to the work of IVAM (Institut Valencià d’Art Modern) with research on Women Architects in Valencia (1929–1980) and were awarded the IAWA Milka Bliznakov Research Prize in 2019 at Virginia Tech (USA) for their proposal to study Spanish-speaking women architects in the International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA). They were partners in the research project YesWePlan! Promoting Women in Architecture and Civil Engineering (2019–2021), funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, and are currently partners in the European project ARCH-E. European Platform for Architectural Design Competitions (2022–2024) and NAIX-EM, a project for inclusive birthing houses in the Valencian Community (2023–2025). They are also coordinators at the UPV of the ARTICULACIONES certificate, organised by IVAM, the University of Valencia, and the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Both of them direct the CUG Càtedra de Urbanisme i Gènere, which began its activities in September 2022 and supported the ICAG2023 congress held at UPV in October 2023.
