Born and raised in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, José Ignacio Kempff Seleme is an architect with Spanish and European architectural licensure, currently working at Foster + Partners in Madrid. He completed his BSc in Foundations of Architecture and his M.Arch at the Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM) within the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, complemented by studies at the Technische Universität München and a postgraduate degree in BIM from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He then completed the MSc in Architectural Computation at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) in London, where his thesis, “Scoring the Sky: Zoning, Daylight, and the Design Spaces of Midtown Manhattan”, was awarded the Alasdair Turner Prize.

José Ignacio works at the intersection of architecture and computation, treating computational design tools for the built environment as both method and application across scales. At Foster + Partners he focuses on parametric design and BIM coordination for international projects, from overall geometry to façade systems. Before that, he worked on industrial and data-centre buildings at Ingeser and Sener, and in on-site construction at Ensamble Studio, after earlier experience in studios in Bolivia and Germany. He is particularly interested in construction innovation, from BIM to Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA), and in the tools that support it: he is the author of Mite, an open-source Grasshopper plugin published on Food4Rhino and selected for the XERJ Corpus Hub.

Committed to teaching, he has mentored over 25 M.Arch students as a computational design specialist at Miautics, and coordinates the AI Simulation module at the MIAWS master (ETSAM, UPM).