Designing spaces for life, cities, and nature to thrive.
UltraBarrio engages in architecture and urban design projects that respond to the urgent challenges of our communities. Our central goal is to shape cities to be more civic, sustainable, and generationally connected by design.
Dialect Commons is awarded an Honorable Mention in The Architect’s Newspaper’s 2025 Best of Design Awards
Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Education
Dialect Commons is an ultra-access hybrid kiosk that functions as a civic anchor and community resource in one of Houston’s most linguistically diverse neighborhoods.
Transit Commons
In our award-winning work for transit, we obsessively map the experience of transit with the arc of housing, access, intensity of thermal impacts, light levels, character, biodiversity, and watersheds to frame urgent paths for prioritization.
Southwest Civic Core Community Pavilion
Supported through grants and local agencies - the Pavilion fulfills the gaps in community supportive programming with Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Services, Library, Classroom Kitchen, and Community Hall. Currently in CDs.
Drawing Codes Exhibit
Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols of Architectural Representation, book published by Andrew Kudless and Adam Marcus features UltraBarrio’s work: Context: Encoding and Emergence
Venice Exhibition 2025
UltraBarrio was invited by The European Cultural Centre to exhibit in the Venice 2025 Architecture Biennale TIME SPACE EXISTENCE exhibition from May to November 2025, focused on our work in transforming the public realm.
APA-Houston Gold Award
The H-GAC South Houston Livable Centers Study, advancing a comprehensive vision for healthy living, received a Gold Planning Achievement award in Transportation Planning from the Houston Chapter of the American Planning Association.
Finding Home Initiative
UltraBarrio is thrilled to partner with Houston Land Bank on The Finding Home Initiative, a transformative effort to create affordable and resilient housing in Houston’s underserved neighborhoods.
Rice Civic Forum
Amna convenes the 2025 Rice Civic Forum In Motion: Downtown Streets, Stories, and People, inviting planners, data scientists, architects and community leaders to discuss how housing, transit, public space and cultural innovation are shaping the city’s future.
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URBAN DESIGN
Our projects provoke design and research around connectivity, land-use, sustainability, equity, access, and the relationship of spaces to interactions. We bring optimism, pragmatism, futurism, and strategy to every project:
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ARCHITECTURE
We know that no place is like any other. We pursue work that allows us to coax out and celebrate the specificities of context. Our dynamic architecture projects range from civic architecture, tactical urbanism, placemaking, and branded interiors:
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RESILIENCE
Resilient communities are the foundation of healthy cities. Our impactful projects range from post-disaster alternative housing studies, heat studies, transit resiliency projects to design responses for flood-prone environments:
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ULTRABARRIO +
In our design process, placemaking and outreach are indispensable, and we understand the importance of holding a vision that community members believe in. We take care in revitalizing our spaces in unpredictable yet locally embraced ways: