Archinect - News

Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao featured in new Time-Space-Existence video series

2017-11-21T13:53:00-05:00

Eschewing any fixed style or dogma, acclaimed Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao has instead built a body of work that is both visually daring and socially meaningful. As part of our partnership with PLANE—SITE (a Berlin-based creative agency working at the interface of urban form, cultural space and social life), we are sharing the second video from their Time-Space-Existence series which features the prominent architect discussing her work.

In this new short video, Bilbao (b. 1972) suggests that the architect has a moral responsibility to foreground people over profit. In her words, architecture is the act of “making places and spaces, by people, for people”. Produced by PLANE—SITE, the video has been commissioned by the GAA Foundation and funded by the ECC in the run-up to the Time-Space-Existence exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia Architettura (opening May 2018).

VIVIENDA SUSTENTABLE ACUÑA © Jaime Navarro

CASA VENTURA © Rory Gardiner

Bilbao has shot to international prominence in...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Tatiana Bilbao's solution to Mexico's housing shortage

2015-10-20T19:56:00-04:00

Housing – its affordability, accessibility, and form – is a key preoccupation of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. While not necessarily the core concern for most of the Biennial's participants, housing gets a significant share of the exhibition's floorspace.

Several participants' considerations of contemporary housing issues are exhibited in full-scale, benefitting the visitor with an easily relatable (and, at least by size, literally inhabitable) form. As one of these life-sized installations, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio's sustainable housing project stands out for already being realized outside of the Biennial's walls.

Designed in response to Mexico's housing shortage, referencing the country's overall deficit of 9 million homes, Bilbao's Sustainable Housing project aims to provide a prototype for affordable, adaptable, single-family social housing. After researching with potential users and observing concurrent trends in local social housing design, the firm produced a modified vision...

She may favor Brutalist forms...

2013-05-15T11:37:00-04:00

the 40-year-old architect has emerged as one of the country’s major creative voices, building an eclectic portfolio of work that includes a 10,000-square-foot neo-Brutalist palazzo, the master plan for an art-filled botanical garden and a spiritual refuge in the Jalisco Mountains. The projects vary wildly in attitude and style

Nicolai Ouroussoff profiled the Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao, for the NYT, T Magazine "Hot Summer" travel edition.

Menil Collection plans new building for Drawing Institute; four architecture firms named as finalists

2012-04-13T15:47:00-04:00

Four finalists have emerged from the Menil Collection's extensive international search to select an architect to design its Menil Drawing Institute (MDI), the first major project to be built as a part of the museum's long-range master plan.

After several years of site visits, careful research and thoughtful interviews, the Menil's architecture selection committee has announced a short list of long-established and newly-emerging architectural firms:

Tatiana Bilbao — up-and-coming Mexico City architect with a number of high-profile projects under her belt, including a building co-designed with artist Gabriel Orozco
David Chipperfield Architects — renowned London-based firm behind the Menil's 2009 master plan as well as the stunning Figge Art Museum in Iowa
Johnston Marklee — design duo from Los Angeles known for its ultramodern nods to architectural history
SANAA — Tokyo-based designers behind the Toledo Museum of Art's Glass Pavilion and winners of the 2010 Pritzker Prize

The Architecture Work of Tatiana Bilbao

2011-09-03T11:45:00-04:00

Mexican born architect, Tatiana Bilbao focuses on uplifting previously neglected spaces in Mexico’s overcrowded urban centers and drug trafficking plagued rural areas. Her designs are 100% sustainable in terms of water and waste management and 40% sustainable in terms of energy use. She has also launched a sustainable nonprofit organization, MX.DF, to focus urban research and address Mexico’s most pressing problems...