Meir Lobaton Corona and Ulli Heckmann met in Paris in 2010 and discovered that they had more in common than just their architectural education: they share an overall interest in understanding architecture as a multi-dimensional discipline that is not focused on the mere production of autonomous objects, but it is a vehicle that has the capacity to respond to everyday human needs and the power to disrupt the inner stability of the field.
That philosophy soon prompted them to create a think tank committed to explore and blur the existent boundaries between architectural practice and other related disciplines, to focus on the borderline where one system melts into another, on how to re-program the ways people use spaces and how they respond to social conventions, in other words, to imagine new scenarios for everyday living in contemporary cities.
With an open approach to the vast possibilities that design, art and architecture have to offer –brought with different intensities by each one of them– they have tested their ideas in a series of self-commissioned exercises and public competitions always faced with the spirit of a research laboratory.
Meir Lobaton Corona // b. Mexico City, Mexico 1974 // Architect UIA, MSc. AAD //
Meir received an Architecture degree from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City in 2002 and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University GSAPP in 2007. As a CONACYT Scholar, he graduated from Columbia with Honors for Excellence in Design, and was a recipient of the Lucille Smyser Lowenfish Memorial Design Prize.
Meir has taught architectural design studios at Columbia University in New York City and Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and has been an invited critic in several architecture schools worldwide.
Since 1996 he has been involved in multiple projects in various fields, ranging from architecture, design and visual arts. His work has been widely featured in international publications and exhibited in mayor art galleries and museums all over the world, including the MoMA and PS1 in New York, UNTIMITED – Art Basel 42 in Basel, Switzerland, the MAM in Medellin, Colombia and Matadero in Madrid, Spain and the Arsenale in Venice, Italy
He currently lives and works in Paris, France, where he works on in several art and architectural commissions in Latin America.
Ulli Heckmann // b. Heidelberg, Germany 1979 // Dipl. Ing. Architektur
Ulli studied architecture in Germany and France (Ecole d’architecture et de paysage de Bordeaux) and graduated from the Technical University in Darmstadt, Germany, in 2006. He speaks and writes perfectly 3 languages (German, English and French). After his studies he worked in architecture and landscape architecture offices in Berlin and Frankfurt before moving to Paris in 2011.
He has more than 5 years of experience in urbanism, residential and industrial design. Ulli has a vast body of work which includes the 3rd prize on the Museum Sander Mathildenhöhe in 2010 and the 1st prize in Helenenhöfe Frankfurt, 44000 mc Housing and urbanism competition in 2010, just to mention a few.
Since 2012 he works as a freelance project architect at Maison Edouard François in Paris, together with Meir Lobaton and others architects he is working on several architectural projects and competitions all over the world.
