No amount of badmouthing from the White House can dampen enthusiasm for Mexico, a fount of exciting design and architecture. DnA learns more about it, on a trip to Mexico City and in conversation with the founders of SCI-Arc’s satellite school in the Mexican capital.
While President Trump sends out tweet after negative tweet about Mexico, designers and architects are preoccupied with the country for other reasons: it is fast emerging as a capital of cool.
“In Los Angeles particularly there’s a really growing interest in Mexican culture at large, and Mexico City particularly,” said Hernan Diaz Alonso, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, or SCI-Arc, in the Arts District.
What is attractive, he says, is the combination of “contemporary technology and old crafts traditions. And you can see these in food, in fashion, in art.”
You can find cross-border collaborations, pop-ups of Mexican design in Los Angeles and, in Mexico City and other cities, dazzling new buildings by architects such as Michel Rojkind and Alberto Kalach as well as ancient edifices dating back as far as the Aztec empire.
Diaz says he believes that “Mexico City has become the beacon of the Latin American city,” and the school has established a satellite in the capital.
It is helmed by the architect Francisco Pardo out of his architecture office in the Juarez neighborhood, buzzing with new eateries, clubs and modern Mexican design stores.
Visiting students and faculty collaborate on projects of interest to both cities, such as affordable housing.
One of the cross-collaborations was to design prototypical houses for INFONAVIT, the Mexican “Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores,” a federal organization established in 1972 to provide credits for worker housing in Mexico to maquiladora employees.
In the view of Pardo and other critics, INFONAVIT has devolved into a loan agency, relinquishing design, build and quality control to developers. The result: thousands of ill-built homes located in unsustainably distant locations.
Prototypes by four SCI-Arc faculty teams (Griffin Enright; Pita + Bloom; Zago Architecture; RNThomsen Architecture) were selected and are being built.
Students also are learning how to manage growth in cities that are essentially city-states. The two cities share some challenges, like over-dependence on cars and fast-growing populations. At times they follow each other.
Los Angeles is embracing Latin-style public space more than in the past, evidenced most recently by passage of a framework for a street vending law.
And it has differences. There is huge poverty in Mexico City and the rest of Mexico but, according to Pardo, less homelessness. Why might that be?
Pardo talked to DnA about all this, and about what visiting Mexican students take away from their visits to SCI-Arc. The photos on this page are of some sights in Mexico City, taken on a recent trip there.