In 2016, we partnered with Terreno Baldio gallery owner to do their new gallery in Roma Norte, Mexico City.
Three row houses of three floors were demolished almost in its entirety. Their main facades were refurbished and thier plots merged to become one.
The idea of the project and its relationship with the existing building starts by leaving it untouched from the extension. In order to do this, the new building keeps a distance from its boundary, preserving part of the emptiness that was left by what once existed, conceiving itself as a free standing object, like in sculpture. This project is influenced in a way by conversations we had with the client and well known Mexican sculptor Javier Marin as he is in involved with Terreno Baldio’s gallery run by Eduardo Mier y Teran.
The disposition of the pillar and the beam define the interval, which is the space created to house works of art. What is proposed is a work that meditates on the forms of the elements of architecture and sculpture where architecture distances itself from the processes of carving and modeling and where, rather, sculpture could become a piece that consists purely of a simple composition and disposition of a prefabricated object, in this way it is pretty much conceived like the art from the minimalists such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Walter di Maria. The availability of these pieces and their easy assembly make this system a coherent solution according to the flexibility of uses, its economy, speed and construction in stages.
Positioning the building in the center of the terrain gives it the advantage of being flexible in being able to ventilate and illuminate by any orientation that is necessary; besides creating views towards the same interior of the land and its surroundings.