Enchanted Matter is a design research studio founded by Carlos Sabogal García (b. 1990) and Alaa Quraishi (b. 1993), based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Working across installation, architectural intervention, and spatial storytelling, the studio investigates how built environments shape memory, ritual, and belonging; particularly within contexts marked by displacement, erasure, and transformation. The name is both ethos and method. Enchanted Matter holds a generative tension: between material and myth, precision and poetics, presence and absence.

ENCHANTED
The work asks how architecture might expand into a dream-like state: symbolic, affective, spectral. Through mirrored, layered, and fragmented geometries, the studio constructs forms that distort the familiar, inviting re-reading and re-presentation. Enchantment is used as strategic whimsy; a mode of holding ambiguity and animating public space with layered meaning.

MATTER
Materials are approached not as neutral, but as agents of cultural weight: vessels of undocumented labor, colonial residue, and embodied knowledge. Matter is treated as witness, experiment, and counter-archive; another player in the construction of culture.

CARLOS
Carlos received his M Arch from California College of the Arts, where he explored how computational design might be reoriented around vernacular intelligence, indigenous systems, and contextual craft. From 2016 to 2024, he worked with Future Forms, leading the integration of analog and computational fabrication methods in large-scale public artworks. His work is materially grounded in a contextual digital practice. Carlos was born in Colombia and came to the United States as a DREAMer.

ALAA
Alaa earned her M Arch from MIT, where her research focused on speculative spatial storytelling and the potential of misreading and mythology as tools of agency. She has worked with Antoine Predock Architect, Lina Ghotmeh Architecture, and Design Earth. She was also a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico. Alaa is the child of Lebanese and Indian immigrants.

ETHOS
Their personal histories; of migration, border-crossing, and layered belonging; are not simply background, but frameworks through which their work is shaped. Identity becomes methodology: a way of reading, resisting, and reimagining space. Together, they formed Enchanted Matter to merge these concerns; design as a site of both resistance and wonder.

PRINCIPLES
WORK: An insistence on the politics of making. Their projects foreground labor—especially invisible, undocumented, or feminized forms such as care, maintenance, and domestic construction.

MYTH: A commitment to symbolic form. Rather than replicate typologies, they disassemble and recompose them, constructing rituals that fracture and reimagine the familiar.
EDGE: A dedication to threshold work: disciplinary, geographic, and cultural. They navigate margins, refracting dominant spatial languages through hybridity, migration, and situated histories. Their work continues to explore how narrative, labor, and edge converge in the sculptural and architectural realm—asking how public space can host complexity, multiplicity, and transformation.