172 TATIANA BILBAO
TAT I A N A BIL B AO
M É X I C O C I T Y, M É X I C O 19° 17’ N
1–2 I would like to provide you with some context for
the place in which we work and what we do. I think of our prac-
tice in plural terms because without the work of the thirty-two
architects who form our office, it would not be possible. Our practice
has had the opportunity of working in many different cities and
programs, in projects all over Mexico and the world. We are a very
young practice, and this brings an incredible creative character to
our firm. However, we are also a learning practice, since every proj-
ect and program we start is a potentially new experience.
Our office works out of Mexico City, one of the larg-
est cities in the world, with over twenty-two million people. It is
very dense; however, it does not have the density of, say, New York.
L ATITUDES: ARCHITEC TURE IN THE AMERICAS 173
Opposite to New York, Mexico City is very flat; the average building
height is two floors. We have only two strips of tall buildings—in
the city center and, of course, in the new developing areas. The city
is in a valley surrounded by mountains, a little bit like the condi-
tions in Medellin, Colombia, but with a longer and wider valley. The
city spreads out from the center of the valley all the way to the
mountains and reaches its geographic limit on the hills. Some of
the largest settlements in the city are informal. They started as
agricultural land and were invaded and then sold illegally, but
became legal for the new owners with rights for infrastructure.
This is, in a way, how urbanism works in Mexico. There is no
planning, just urbanism. The city keeps growing irregularly, and
then the government arrives and puts in the necessary infrastruc-
ture for the different areas.
174 TATIANA BILBAO
7
1 Casa Universo for the artist Gabriel
Orozco 2 Mexico City 3 Mexico City
growing toward the surrounding hills
4 The Zocalo, Plaza Mayor in Mexico
City 5 Campus of the Universidad
Nacional 6 Affluent developments
on the city’s hills 7 Informal housing
conditions 8 Sterile housing develop-
ments 9 Historic Center, Mexico City
10 My office and team
3–8 The historic center is dominated by the Metro-
politan Cathedral, built by the Spanish colonizers on top of one of
the largest Aztec temples. Another major structure, the campus of
the National University, houses 300,000 students; architect Mario
Pani developed the university’s master plan in the 1950s. Pani, for
me, is one of the most representative and important modern archi-
tects in Mexico. For this project, Pani invited many architects and
artists from his generation to contribute work. As a result, every
building in this master plan is the product of a different architect.
This practice, however, has been since lost in Mexico. I don’t recall
any other architectural project on which other architects were
invited to contribute or collaborate. However, this is changing, and
one of the projects I am presenting was developed with this idea of
collaborative effort.
New developments are taking over the hills
of Mexico City. They consist of tall, residential buildings, which
are easier to build in the hills because of the firmness of the
ground, as opposed to the middle of the valley where the ground
L ATITUDES: ARCHITEC TURE IN THE AMERICAS 175
10
is muddy because it was the site of a past lake. And so, Mexico
City has arrived at the hills, and people have densely populated
them in many different ways. In the very affluent areas, one finds
ample structures with over-imposing, flat gardens. On the other
hand, one can also find the vast mass of informal residences,
disorganized and underdeveloped. There is a big effort to try to solve
the problems of housing, however, as Giancarlo Mazzanti mentioned,
unfortunately the approach has been limited to building strict
and sterile developments.
9 The center of the city is very green chiefly because
of the tempered climate, but also because of a policy started during
the 1940s or 1950s, which encouraged residents to plant trees. Our
office is in a beautiful area of Mexico City, the very representative
Calle de las Reforma. All public events happen here, demonstrators
march through this street, and successful soccer matches are cele-
brated here. The financial world resides here, so it is a street full of
176 TATIANA BILBAO L ATITUDES: ARCHITEC TURE IN THE AMERICAS 177

11

14

12

13

11 House a Ordos, model 12 ZTBA
13 Juarez Community Center
14 Spectacle Center in Irapuato
energy. I wanted the office to be here, so that it would be surrounded
by this energy. I believe that this energy is necessary to do what we
do and to being where we are.
10–12 Those are the physical conditions of our office,
a bit messy, since we work a lot with models. As I mentioned,
we have had the oppor tunity of working on many dif ferent
projects. At the beginning, we started exploring different geome-
tries, but our architecture has changed through the years, and we
tried to explore simpler geometries and more expressive spaces.
Lately, we have developed a deeper interest in space itself, in
atmosphere, light conditions, the proportions, and the materials
in our designs. We use simple materials. As José María was saying,
in our countries, this is what we have; this is how we do architec-
ture. We use stone, concrete, glass, compacted earth, and bricks, and
we try to combine them to generate different types of buildings that
fit different types of programs.
13–14 We have started to develop a series of commu-
nity centers in Cuidad Juarez. This project is important because
Cuidad Juarez currently has the same conditions that Medellin had
in the past during its drug war years. Following the example of
Medellin’s rehabilitation, the local administration wants to start
rebuilding the city through different insertions of buildings in
the public space. We don’t have the kind of luck that Giancarlo
has had in Colombia, however, since architecture is not impor-
tant for politicians in Mexico. Public buildings in Mexico are not
given out by competitions; most of the projects are handled by
clientelism and nepotism. However, there has been some hope
of change. We are working with dif ferent local governments
such as the government of Irapuato, a small town in the north
of Mexico where we developed the Spectacle Center. In such
areas you actually do find people who are interested in architec-
ture within the realm of politics and administration. These are
very different conditions from those with which we have worked
with in the past. In addition to the local governments, we also
have been able to work with the federal government in other proj-
ects, proving that there is a way into the bureaucracy. But, all in all,
it is not fair that young architects have no real chance to measure
and show their talents in competitions and public projects. In
Mexico, personal relationships are still much more likely to be the
reason for a commission.
178 TATIANA BILBAO L ATITUDES: ARCHITEC TURE IN THE AMERICAS 179

17

15

19

18

16
15–16 Casa Universo for the artist
Gabriel Orozco 17–19 Patio Intervention
at MACO Oaxaca
15–16 We have also developed small projects, like this
house we designed for an artist named Gabriel Orozco. This experi-
ence led us to another world entirely. Working with Gabriel allowed
us to understand our architecture very differently. This was the
point at which we started changing the way we did architecture.
Whereas at first we were trying to explore different geometries that
were not perfectly defined, while working in such an intense situ-
ation with this artist, our approach became focused on transform-
ing sensuality and materials and simple, common, everyday things
into moments of art, just like Gabriel does. We started exploring
more the materiality and space, rather than looking for different or
exciting geometries. In this sense, the house was a breaking point
in our work. We have had the opportunity to work on projects rang-
ing from a botanical garden to a funeral house, and projects dealing
with life and death; I think that the stabilization of the economic
conditions in the country has allowed architecture to flourish.
Thus, I feel we are in the right moment, at the right place, for doing
what we are doing.
17–19 One little intervention that we did in a museum
continues our current explorations. It is an intervention in a very
simple patio in a historic building from the eighteenth century
that is in Oaxaca, a city built around the sixteenth century. The
whole historic center is very well preserved, and the people there
are very careful about building interventions. There are some inter-
ventions that have been not very well done. In this particular case,
the building had gone through many preservation processes that
were not part of a larger plan and were more of a collection of ‘face-
lift’ finishes piled on top of each other. We decided to remove these
finishes and to leave the building ‘in the nude’ to express the impor-
tance of the materiality and also to make obvious the architect’s
job of defining the final finishes in a building. The intervention
changes the perception of the space by the changes established on
its image, and small but important decisions, such as painting the
steel with black paint.
180 TATIANA BILBAO L ATITUDES: ARCHITEC TURE IN THE AMERICAS 181

20

21 24

23

As José Maria was saying, we also believe in an

22
20 Catholic pilgrimage for Rosary Virgin
to Talpa, Jalisco 21 Open Chapel, Tatiana
Bilbao and Derek Dellekamp 22 Site plan
of Chapel area 23 Site plan of a sanctuary
point, Ai Wei Wei 24 Detail of finished
sanctuary wall
architecture that has the most direct impact and keeps a sense of
spontaneity. It is perceived as the most obvious thing that could
happen. This was the intention behind the concept of the museum
alteration. In the end, we found out that everything we took away
from the building totaled 70 sacks of cement, 32 liters of paint, and
2.7 tons of stone. We removed a lot of weight from the structure.
Usually, when the structural engineer is calculating the weight
of a structure, you as an architect almost never relate to it since it
is too abstract as a figure, but when you physically take away that
much weight from a structure, you start to understand weight and
structure differently, and you can relate better to it.
Our architecture is about public spaces; it’s about
dealing with people—their perceptions, the way they are, and the
ways that they live.
20 The next and more recent project is a pilgrimage
route in the north of the country. It goes from a small town named
Ameca to another town named Talpa. The pilgrimage is a Catholic
ritual; ninety-five percent of the population in Mexico is Catholic.
The event takes place during the Holy Week, with about three
million people participating. The route itself is really challenging,
as it has many changes of altitude and goes from about 1,000 to
almost 2,000 meters above sea level. The pilgrimage takes about
four days to complete; however, not everybody starts out from
exactly the same point. Thus, the landscape along the 154 kilome-
ters (approximately 100 miles) is rather varied, and we explored it
all. In the past, the route had very bad conditions, and the only exis-
ting infrastructure was constructed by the people themselves as
informal places to eat, to rest, and to pray, and as little altars to
place photos, wishes, and commemorative structures. There are also
graves along the route because burying your loved ones in this holy
route is seen as a pious act. Our task was to do a master plan, incor-
porating new infrastructure that would allow the route to be more
transited and visited, and developing it into the likes of Santiago de
Compostela, which is visited by approximately ten million people
per year.
2 1–32 Although there are small towns along the route,
the lack of infrastructure created sanitary problems in the past;
therefore, one of our principal objectives was to provide the neces-
sary services for the pilgrims that would follow the same conditions
182 TATIANA BILBAO
25
26
25–27 Observatory by architects HHF
from Basel, Switzerland 28 Observatory
designed by Alejandro Aravena, Chile 29
Focal point with Virgin Mary 30 Framed
view in Aravena’s observatory
27
established before, with areas for resting, medical services, eating,
and worship. In addition, we devised special structures as obser-
vatory places to the landscape and as icons that could be recogniz-
able from a distance and could provide orientation for the pilgrims.
In the style of Mario Pani, we decided to invite different archi-
tects to collaborate with us on this project, first, because it would
create a more variable and dynamic master plan and, second,
because it was a rather large project for one office alone. So we
envisioned having different architects from different places and
different contexts, people from Switzerland that would be new to
the concept and people from the region that would have a more
informed idea about the tradition.
We invited architects Christ & Gantenbein and
HHF from Switzerland, Ai Wei Wei from China, Alejandro Aravena
from Chile, and dif ferent architects from Mexico. We thought
each international architect would bring different perspectives
and conditions to the project to create special insertions in the
28
30
program. On the other hand, we thought that the local architects
would provide the familiar and traditional conditions of local mate-
rials and craftsmanship. We could build on positive experiences
by remembering an invitation to collaborate in a project based on
a master plan by Ai Wei Wei in China. For the pilgrimage project I
asked Derek Dellekamp, a Mexican architect, to work with me on the
master plan and the invitations of the external artists/architects.
We decided to do the f irst lit tle str uct ure
ourselves. It was kind of a difficult intervention. The government
wanted a sculpture marking the entrance to the route as an iconic
symbol. We developed a little structure that is based on a cross,
the most important symbol of Catholicism. We established the
cross implicitly with four tall walls, making it a recognizable icon
from far away, but also a shaded place for gathering. Furthermore,
we envisioned the walls to serve as a place where people could
leave messages, wishes, and thoughts about their experiences, a
L ATITUDES: ARCHITEC TURE IN THE AMERICAS 183
29
commemorative space similar to ones established by the people
before. One of the most important aspects of this project was the
involvement of the community in the process, because in this way,
people could feel the project belonged to them. The structure was
erected by local craftsmen and was a very positive experience for
the representatives of Guadalajara and the local population. I am
sad that I could not attend today´s inauguration ceremony for the
pilgrimage route since I am here.
Our second project in the master plan was a little
structure for worship, made with just two walls that are folded into
each other. One is serving as a bench; the other one is providing
shade. Our idea was to use compacted earth to create the folding
walls because of the beautiful color of the earth in this area, thus
creating a picturesque structure that could be very simple and
natural. Due to budget constraints, this structure will be completed
next year. Other projects in the master plan include the wall by
Wei Wei, a structure which received the nickname “Chinese wall.”
The structure rises from the earth and reaches into the sky, creat-
ing in a very poetic way a more intimate relationship of the visitor
184 TATIANA BILBAO
31
32
31 Sanctuary structure designed by Derek
Dellekamp, Mexico 32 Completed sanctu-
ary 33 Biotechnological faculty building
for University of Culiacan 34 Riverfront
masterplan Culiacan 35 Light poles for
riverwalk for Culiacan and the celebration
of the bicentennial 36 Addition to Cultural
Center, Culiacan 37 Aerial view of existing
conditions of botanical garden, Culiacan
38 Gateway in existing botanical garden
39 Social areas in existing botanical
garden
33
35
36
34
with the earth, as intended by the artist/architect. The Basel-based
firm HHF developed an observatory structure. It is one of the most
playful pieces in the master plan. It is a single stair that unfolds
around an axis until it reaches the top. People really love it; the
local kids go there to play since the construction was done with
the intention of making its construction totally apparent. Another
landmark is Alejandro Aravena’s observatory. It is a box-like struc-
ture on a hill, placed to create the sensation that it is falling down.
A section of the box tilts up to become the observatory. At certain
moments, the sun throws the shadow of the Virgin Mary onto differ-
ent points in the box. The finishes are rough by intention. The last
project in the pilgrimage route was a design by Derek Dellekamp,
the other Mexican architect besides Luis Aldrete. His intervention
is a circle that spans 40 meters in diameter, encompassing the land-
scape and the sky in its design. It is done in the same language of
white concrete that we employed in our cross structure. There are
benches for people to sit and to rest, and also spaces for worship.
These little insertions in the pilgrimage route
L ATITUDES: ARCHITEC TURE IN THE AMERICAS 185
within the social context are very special and important for the
region. We were very lucky to be able to do this project and to expe-
rience a ritual that was new to us in a context with which we are
definitely familiar.
33–36 A very different situation, the second project that
I would like to present is a botanical garden located in the north
of the country in Culiacan. The city has the dubious fame of being
the capital of drug dealers. A big cartel is established there, and it
is an important point of entry for drugs in transit from Colombia
through Culiacan via Ciudad Juarez and into El Paso, Texas.
Because of the drug wars and violence, businesses are shrinking,
and the economy in the region is deflating. We are working with the
city government to attempt to revitalize the social and economic
conditions. Culiacan, which has approximately one million inhab-
itants, is crossed by two rivers and has very flat conditions, similar
to Mexico City. The riverfront, however, is underutilized, since the
city turns its back to the river. The architecture in this city is not
very remarkable, and it is not well preserved. The city was founded
in the sixteenth century; however, the architecture that remains is
from the 1950s.
186 TATIANA BILBAO
37
Culiacan is also very religious. I believe ninety-
eight percent of the population is Catholic; even the drug dealers
have strong religious convictions. The city’s culture is intertwined
with the drug culture, with their religious credos oscillating in
a morbid and fragile way between life and death. This was the
context in which we were working, and it was also a good reason for
working there. It is one of the most important cities in Mexico, agri-
culturally speaking. The kinds of businesses flourishing here are
enormously varied. It is the home base of one of the most important
house builders in the whole country, as well as retail businesses,
agricultural products, fertilizers—all companies from Culiacan.
One of the city’s entrepreneurs, a businessman, decided that he
wanted to change the face of the city and the perception of its inhab-
itants to make them more proud of living there.
Before I discuss the project for the Botanical
Garden, I want to talk about some projects that we were able to
develop because of the impact of the Botanical Garden. We are now
developing five other projects within Culiacan, which allows us
to feel that we are really intervening in the city’s development
process, creating different public spaces, different situations, and
different programs that could influence a lot what is happening in
the city. One of the buildings that we are doing is a structure for the
university in Culiacan. This building is in public use; all the instal-
lations could be used by the community. It serves as an auditorium
for the entire city, since the city has none. It is rented for many
different events, connecting the campus to the city life. The govern-
ment invested money in this building because they believe it to be
an important building for the civic progress of the city.
We also worked on a proposal for a riverwalk. We
were asked to do a monument for the bicentennial commemorating
the independence of Mexico from Spain. For this occasion, every
other city was granted a budget to develop projects commemorating
the event. The governor, who knew us from the botanical garden
and from other projects, asked us to do a sculpture as an entrance to
the city. We, however, convinced him that doing a sculpture with
no real use would only have a momentary importance. Rather, we
38
39
proposed an intervention in the center of the city that could have a
real use and create a more lasting image and memory. We decided to
create a riverwalk that would turn the face of the city toward the
river, developing and revitalizing these areas and, of course, creat-
ing a romantic and conceptual structure as a commemoration of the
bicentennial. Our proposal was to extend the landscape as a way of
bringing the people to the river; conceptually speaking, we wanted
to tell people,“Come to the river. It’s really good. We even bring the
landscape, so you can enjoy it in the middle of the river. Use it, and
keep it so that things here can start changing.”
All the poles—there are two hundred in total, each
one representing one year—are wrapped by a solar capturing film
in order to save energy. It is not a lot of saved energy, but enough to
light approximately thirty light poles. It is a self-sustained system,
not connected to the energy system of the city. It does not need to be.
It is also not connected to the sewage system of the city, since the
project does not need any water and is not producing any water. It
L ATITUDES: ARCHITEC TURE IN THE AMERICAS 187
is totally sustainable, and thus a monument of the future, of things
we should do—simple interventions that could really transform the
life of the city in the long run.
Along the same idea, we were also involved in an
addition on top of a cultural building in Culiacan. It was a build-
ing from the 1980s that the city wanted to demolish. We thought
that to demolish it was a bad idea, not only from the economic side,
but also, and most importantly, because it was a good piece of archi-
tecture, and we think good architecture should be appreciated. We
convinced the city to make an addition instead that would allow
the building to hold the extra program that was needed. With this
addition, we also created more shaded spaces so that people could
use the exterior spaces much more than they did before.
37– 4 0 The main project, which initiated all these devel-
opments in Culiacan, was the botanical garden; and I think of it
as one of the most representative projects our office has, for many
reasons. We were developing this project at the same time we were
188 TATIANA BILBAO
40
41
doing the house of Gabriel Orozco, so it was a turning point in many
ways. From Gabriel we learned many things, and for this garden,
we learned from many others. The main lesson was with the multi-
disciplinary aspect of this project. We believe that architecture
needs to integrate different disciplines to respond to the conditions
of today’s society, so we work with philosophers, urbanists, design-
ers, graphic designers, artists, botanists, politicians, economists,
and businessmen, involving everybody in the project. That is why
the project took so long to complete, of course, because it was hard to
coordinate with everybody and to agree on everything. It was chal-
lenging, but everybody’s input was very important for the project.
The background of the project was the desire of a
local businessman to change the face of the city. This businessman
is an art afiçionado with an important collection of contemporary
art, but furthermore, he is also very interested in botanicals. When
he became the president of the Board of Patrons of this garden, he
decided the garden, as a public space, had to be improved to promote
the civic progress of the city. Unlike in the US, in Mexico it’s very
42
hard to find private citizens who will partner with the government
for sponsoring public works. Therefore, a businessman donating a
large amount of money to develop this project for the city was a
very important example for the rest of the country. Our client
invited a curator, Patrick Charpenel, to select thirty-five pieces
from his art collection to install them in the garden. However,
Patrick convinced him instead to commission thirty-five artists
to do site-specific work in the garden, artists such as Don Graham,
James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, Gabriel Orozco, and Francis Alys.
Also, the board of patrons thought that the garden needed differ-
ent structures to hold the new programs in the garden and to make
it an entertaining and educational space. This was when we were
invited to join the project.
For me, when I first visited, the most important
part of the garden was to discover its spontaneity, in appreciation of
the fact that this garden was being built by a person with no formal
43
botanical instruction, but with a passion for plants. The plants
were arranged by pure aesthetic and at random. It created a natural
space that was welcoming and not objectified. The naturalistic and
unstructured characteristics of the garden made it more accessible
to people and eliminated the certain aristocracy that is associated
with places like this and with museums in Mexico, thus making it
less frightful for the average citizen to enter and visit. I was intimi-
dated myself at the beginning, knowing that I knew nothing about
botanicals. But when I went there, I found this place very welcom-
ing, and it taught me about plants and the difference of species. We
wanted to carry this attitude over to the future garden as well.
We started by enhancing the existing condi-
tions of the garden. The place was used for many purposes, and we
wanted to acknowledge that in our design. It is a place visited by six
thousand people a day, and we definitely wanted to maintain this
frequency, if not enhance it. The high number of visitors expresses
the sympathy that is felt for the place. It is used as a destination for
school field trips, as a regular promenade for the people of the city,
and also as scenery for Quinceaneras (sweet sixteen parties), a very
important event in the life of Mexican girls.
L ATITUDES: ARCHITEC TURE IN THE AMERICAS 189
41–4 3 We started our design very intuitively. We met
as a design team and began throwing our individual ideas on the
table. Soon we decided that in order to cope with all the individual,
piece-meal interventions for this very ambitious project, we needed
a master plan that could organize everything, so that the project
would also make sense as a whole. We started to overlay differ-
ent grids that could connect the existing places as a meta-struc-
ture. After many iterations for testing geometric grids, we realized
that we were dealing with nature that had evolved very sponta-
neously. In that sense, we needed something more organic to orga-
nize it. We decided to trace the branches of a tree from the botanical
garden and then to overlap it on the existing grid and adapt it to
the new program. We liked the adaptability of this system for rear-
rangements and renovations. Then, we started by adding the new
programs that we needed: an auditorium, a place for exhibitions, an
educational facility for kids, a greenhouse, and the general services
areas such as cafeteria, toilets, and offices.
190 TATIANA BILBAO
44
46
45
48
40 Set for quinceañera's photo shoots
41 Overlap of a tree-branch structure over
the garden's grid 42 Master plan layout
47
43 New water features in the garden
44–45 Art piece by Allora & Calazadilla
46 Pavilion by Dan Graham 47 Pavilion by
Olafur Eliasson 48 A work by Mario Garcia
Torres dealing with the issue of drug
culture, Cannabis Plants 49 Aerial view of
pavilion by artist Olafur Eliasson 50 Work
by Richard Long 51 A piece by Julian Opie
46
50
The development of the garden is slow because
of the substance with which we are working; it takes around four
months to move a tree, and we had to move quite a few. In the mean-
time, all thirty-five invited artists had visited the place and decided
on their interventions. Half of the artists decided, by the way, to
thematize their object around the exotic “drug dealer problem.”
We have been working with a botanical expert
to reinforce and enhance the collection of species so that we can
transform the garden into one of the most important botanical
gardens in Mexico. We have built the main water pond, the first
in a group of five water features that we are envisioning, which
will create different sensations and refreshing conditions along
the walk. The weather is very extreme there, so it’s nice when one
arrives at these water features, which are also very important for
the ecosystem of these areas. We’ve been working in the botani-
cal garden with little insertions from time to time. One of the aims
was to never close the garden to the public, and as a result, it is
becoming a favorite attraction in the city. In the afternoons, people
L ATITUDES: ARCHITEC TURE IN THE AMERICAS 191
51
go there and just walk and see whom they meet. We are working
with the garden while it is open, only shutting down the areas
where we are working at any given time.
We have changed the irrigation systems, which
are now totally sustainable. They do not require electricity or water
from anywhere else other than the garden itself or the river that
crosses Culiacan. We also started designing little seating areas and
pathways that lead to different places in the botanical garden.
4 4 –51 The art program is very ambitious. There are
pieces from different artists from Mexico and all parts of the world,
some of the artists being stars of the international contemporary art
scene. The collection includes works from Malone & Cassidy, young
American artists, as well as a project by Abraham Cruz Villegas.
There is a pavilion already installed by Dan Graham that works
with the reflection of the glass produced by different areas; another
pavilion is an installation by Olafur Eliasson, who works with the
geometry of steel columns that bend and form different shadows
during the pass of the day. There is a work by Mario Garcia Torrez
that addresses the drug dealer problem with a plastic cannabis
plant (since he was not allowed to grow a real one). Other invited
192 TATIANA BILBAO
52
54
56
52 Library 53–54 Educational facilities
55 Greenhouse 56 Guns that belonged
to the drug dealers smashed, melted and
transformed into gardening tools by the
artist Pedro Reyes 57 Open auditorium
53
55
57
artists that have collaborated in the project are: Teresa Margolles,
Rivane Neuenschwander, Julian Opie, Gabriel Orozco, Richard Long,
Jorge Pardo and Valeska Soares, Diana Thater, James Turrell, and
Franz West, who will install some fountains in the water pond that
we created.
52–57 All the buildings are done in the same way with
the same spontaneous attitude toward the masterplan. We want
them to appear like little rocks inserted into the garden. The defi-
nition is simple—raw concrete, exposed concrete—and the shape
is light and organic in response to the park. The only building that
was defined in a different way was the greenhouse because we
needed it to have very different conditions on the interior. We had to
control the light and the temperature, and we needed to use glass, so
we decided to use the same geometry, but with the definition of the
space done by glass. We also needed to control the amount of light
that was entering, so we found a film that allowed us to get just
the amount of temperature and humidity and light that we needed.
Since we also needed to not allow all one hundred percent of the
L ATITUDES: ARCHITEC TURE IN THE AMERICAS 193
place to be open or closed at any time, we needed around forty-five
percent of light emmission. To achieve this, we cut the film in the
shape of a shadow of a tree we had found there, to let the light enter
in the exact same amount.
The project is slow, but it is moving and coming
to an end in 2011. We are very excited that this botanical garden
is almost there and ready to be handed over to the city, but in the
meantime, we are also sad since we now have to hand over what
has become “our” garden. This project has allowed us to learn a lot
and to understand how different professions deal with the work—
not only the artists, but the curators, the urban planners, the ecolo-
gists, the politicians, and everybody that we had to deal with over
the past five years. It has created a lot of good energy on many differ-
ent levels, and we created a truly multi-disciplinary team of people
with vastly different backgrounds.
Copyright of Center: Architecture & Design in America is the property of University of Texas at Austin, Center
for American Architecture & Design and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to
a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or
email articles for individual use.