Andrés Jaque is a Spanish architect, urbanist, and researcher, and the founder of Office for Political Innovation, a practice that investigates the intersections of architecture, politics, and everyday life. Jaque’s work spans design, research, and public interventions, often focusing on how built environments shape social and political conditions. He has exhibited widely at international institutions including the Venice Biennale, MoMA, and the Guggenheim, and his research addresses issues from climate change to social justice, emphasizing the transformative potential of architecture in public life.

Iván Munera is an academic, curator, and researcher whose work explores the intersections of urbanism, architecture, and social change. Munera’s exhibitions and visual projects illuminate the social, cultural, and political dimensions of cities and territories, highlighting how built environments mediate experiences of migration, inequality, and public space. His work is recognized for its analytical depth and its capacity to render complex social phenomena visually compelling.

Commissioned by The World Around for its special Earth Day 2020 program, their collaborative film, The Transscalar Architecture of Covid-19, examines the coronavirus pandemic through a montage of spaces across multiple scales – from microscopic images of the virus to global maps showing its impact on travel, pollution, and urban environments. The film documents dramatic transformations of the built environment, including conference centers converted into temporary hospitals and empty city streets reclaimed by wildlife, while also exploring how the pandemic has differently affected people around the world depending on social and economic circumstances.

“The Transscalar Architecture of Covid-19 tracks how coronavirus, its contagion, and its responses are enacted through space,” the filmmakers explain. “[The film] interrogates territorial divides, migration, and the making of refugeeness; old and new geometries of colonialism; tax justice; access to healthcare; racism and xenophobia; warfare rhetoric; surveillance; urban infrastructures; public spaces; and borders. But also: entanglement, cooperation, inventiveness, engagement, and emerging forms of togetherness.”