Max Medina is a Honduran architect and a director at LAVA, the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, an international studio whose work runs from urban masterplans to experimental habitats. His own projects span the same range, from city-scale development to designs for living on the Moon, and the phrase he uses for the discipline is that architecture is a vessel through time and space.
He is from San Pedro Sula and studied architecture at the Universidad de San Pedro Sula, where he was student president for four years and later led the national architecture students’ body. He joined LAVA as a junior partner before becoming a director, and between 2020 and 2024 lectured and ran workshops across Latin America, the United States and Germany on future cities, modular architecture, urban design and startup city development. He spoke at TEDxRoatán on how architecture can change a life, and in 2025 was announced as an astronaut candidate with Titans Space Industries.
In July 2025 he published his first book, Architecture: A Vessel Through Time and Space, presented at the Universidad de San Pedro Sula, which argues for architecture as an instrument of human evolution rather than only of shelter.
His connection to the Free Cities movement runs through Próspera, the special jurisdiction on Roatán, where he has worked on architectural projects. That puts a designer inside a jurisdiction being built from nothing, which is a rarer vantage point than it sounds: most of the argument about new cities is conducted by lawyers and economists, and comparatively little of it is about what the place will look like to stand in.