By Raymund Ryan
The object of architecture is frequently assumed to be a single standalone thing, whether the celebrity icon of recent starchitecture or, conversely, some minimal unit of space and construction. The former struts its wares on the stage of global finance, removed from most daily lives; the latter is primed for economical cloning and, ultimately, environmental misery.
Into this antagonistic world of Big vs. Small, Rich vs. Poor, Innovation vs. Homogenization, the work of Tatiana Bilbao and her colleagues in Tatiana Bilbao Estudio (TBE) constitutes a family of architectural and urban propositions that situate human beings at the center of activities. These proposals are alert to the ways in which things—walls, roofs, floors, furniture—connect to one another, to the territory they create and the programs they instigate. More, now, than simply proposals, these many built designs from this critical practice augment the world in which we find ourselves, both in Mexico and abroad.
Critiques of architecture and of planning have long tended towards formal or informal tropes. These may in broad terms be considered Rationalist or Organic: one big top-down move, the frequent modus operandi of Big Government and capitalism, or a school of many smaller interventions agglomerating into a more complex whole. Bilbao operates amid these ecologies, producing small buildings with suggestions of monumentality (such as Observatory House on the coast of Oaxaca) and, conversely, spacious structures (like ESTOA, the university student center in Monterrey) built up from the multiplication and permutation of legible spaces, intersections, and elements of construction.
If we search for the core values of individual Bilbao projects, or ponder what they collectively amount to, it seems pertinent that the architect’s first job after graduating from Mexico City’s Universidad Iberoamericana in the mid-1990s was with the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing. Alongside the specific needs of buildings and institutions, she thinks about their social, economic, and environmental contexts. Indeed, the larger schemes proposed by her subsequent eponymous practice have the character of friendly neighbors and porous neighborhoods, habitats embedded and augmenting the worlds in which occur.
Their ultimate goal is not so much stylistic or formal as communal and political.
Multiple Centers
This sense of architecture in the service of society is not of course new in Mexico. From the 1920s onwards, vanguard Mexican architects and artists worked to build a more equitable society whether through innovative institutional structures—such as the National Museum of Anthropology by Pedro Ramirez Vázquez with its concrete umbrella canopy in Chapultepec Park—or through social housing—as with the extensive apartment blocks by Mario Pani at Tlatelolco to the north of the capital.
Unlike the main strands of Modernism across the border in the United States, Modernism in Mexico had at its peak, in ways frequently monumental if not downright macho, a goal of nation-building that may now seem distant and utopian yet is nevertheless part of the DNA of Mexican architecture. Today, alongside other key Mexican practices, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio operates with available materials and technology for the benefit of society and the environment.
There are echoes in this work of ideas and aspirations prevalent among thoughtful architects in various cultures two generations ago. In the aftermath of war in Europe and Asia, architects such as those in Team X attempted, as Bilbao is doing now, to re-position the human subject at the center of architectural work. Or, better, at multiple centers. Bilbao is thus in a tradition of architects unafraid of a building’s ultimate users and accepting, even, of imperfection if larger programmatic goals are achieved.
Among the architects critical of post-war uniformity, the work of Lina Bo Bardi suggests some comparisons and contrasts with that of Bilbao today. An Italian who moved to Brazil in 1947, Bo Bardi’s first seminal project, the Casa do Vidro, is a glass house on stilts, relaxing into a more informal composition behind its modernist front…an aunt, perhaps, or a cousin of Los Terrenos, Bilbao’s multipart glazed pavilion in the sylvan hills above Monterrey. Both are at once rationalist and empirical.
Bo Bardi increasingly engaged with the vernacular, as with SESC Pompeia in São Paulo where she added a raw concrete tower, housing womb-like spaces for leisure and sport, into a precinct of old industrial sheds. The elevations of this tower are secondary to the extraordinary stacking of interior volumes not unlike Bilbao’s proposal to infiltrate an existing high-rise in Manhattan with a vertical cascade of spaces or to amass differentiated cubic masses, each its own legible entity, for a tower in Guatemala City.
In the same period, Danish architect Jorn Utzon was inspired by the great earthworks he encountered travelling in Yucatán to emphasize platform-building. He reintroduced ceremonial topography into institutional design, most famously with his Opera House on Sydney Harbor. Even the largest of metropolitan buildings might with such land formation accommodate the individual, similar to the ways a person or family unit can be situated and orientated in the natural world.
There is arguably some similar intersection of joy, topography, and infrastructure in Bilbao’s Monterrey student center, emerging from its sloping site as an inhabited set of voids and nimble concrete frames, and in her massive Mazatlán aquarium, with its many protected maritime habitats not unlike the organs of a resting beast. Through sectional adjustments, these monumental institutions are best accessed from civic rooftop terraces.
Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck learned both from theories of Structuralist philosophy and his observation of daily life. Van Eyck reveled in the potential of children to gather and occupy space with his Amsterdam orphanage (cells at different scales, reminiscent of molecular biology as well as classic religious settlements) and the many playgrounds he designed for that city’s Municipal Office of Public Works in the late 1940s. You can see in the scruffiest of these playgrounds a fusion of elemental geometry and the spiritual aspirations of De Stijl, Suprematism and other Early Modern movements.
His compatriot Herman Hertzberger carries on this baton of humanistic Modernism to the present day. With his headquarters for Centraal Beheer insurance company in Apeldoorn, Hertzberger liberated the everyday life of office workers. His hive-like structure is reminiscent in its internal openness and interconnectedness of Bilbao’s Monterrey student center and her Mazatlán aquarium (where aquatic life may even have priority over human visitors).
This is to suggest for Bilbao a kind of alternative Modernist genealogy, one that is less about technocratic functionalism or abstract perfection. We see in so many of these projects an interest in the ultimate users of architecture and how interaction might be facilitated. The box, as Frank Lloyd Wright proposed over a century ago, is uncaged. It is the users themselves that bring live and meaning to the work. For architecture to have presence, it may even be messy.
Strategy of Collaboration
As the aspirations of Tatiana Bilbao Estudio are focused on human use and ritual, it is not by chance that much of the built work is collaborative. This strategy of collaboration is connected to the studio’s ongoing attention to research. And that research, in turn, is connected to outward communication through graphics and exhibitions. Building and Research inform one another.
Bilbao’s collaborative impulse was signaled early on by the chain of small structures she and half-a-dozen colleagues constructed across the state of Jalisco. Several of this cohort had already built pavilions alongside Bilbao for the Architecture Park in Jinhua, China to a masterplan by the artist Ai Weiwei. In rural Jalisco, the structures are laid out along a hilly route followed by Christian pilgrims each year during Easter Week. Bilbao’s Mesa Colorada hermitage and the Gratitude Open Chapel (co-designed with Derek Dellekamp) use raw concrete to make cost-effective markers in the countryside.
The practice’s collective activity has subsequently evolved with such multi-unit residential projects as the Territorio De Gigantes proposal on the edge of the central Mexican city of Aguascalientes; in Lyon, France, between the rivers Saone and Rhône; and now at Olive West, already partially completed west of Downtown St. Louis in the United States.
In Aguascalientes, the studio worked together with five international practices (Dellekamp from Mexico City, Dogma from Brussels, HHF from Basel, MAIO from Barcelona, and MOS from New York City) to develop a checkerboard massing model within which design proposals for cubic residential buildings can be replicated and attached to one another in multiple permutations. These solid forms are complemented by residual cubic voids that function as small neighborhood plazas.
It is characteristic of the Bilbao studio’s thinking that spaces within individual apartment buildings are described less by the quantitative categories or labels favored by the real estate industry and more by qualitative social function: access, service center, kitchen, day area, night area.
In Lyon, Bilbao has constructed three buildings within a masterplan by the Swiss practice Herzog & de Meuron. Two of the buildings are for public housing; the third is private. In each case, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio has sought to prioritize social interaction through its attention to generous stairwells, where residents encounter one another, and to terraces and balconies that mediate between the interior world of the apartment and the communal space of gardens and streets beyond.
For St. Louis, close to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation by Tadao Ando, Bilbao has planned a long thin urban lot, inviting half-a-dozen other practices to join her in designing modest villa-like houses. To date, houses by Bilbao, Productora (Mexico City), MOS (New York City), and Estudio Macías Peredo (Guadalajara) have been built.
To connect visually and in terms of materiality with the neighborhood, each is clad in brick with the choice of bricks varying in hue across the site. The space between the houses is as vital as the structures themselves with informal pathways, sustainable landscaping and even an edible garden. With one historic building integrated into this mise-en-scène, the urban block will have a new apartment complex at one end designed by Michael Maltzan from Los Angeles. Cory Henry from Los Angeles and Constance Vale from St. Louis have been selected as “emerging architects” to design additional houses immediately across the street.
Bilbao’s collaborative spirit and her instinct for thinking of the domestic realm as a kind of urbanism (and, vice versa, of urbanism as a discipline in need of occasional intimacy) should soon become clear in the new Cistercian monastery she and her practice are designing in the German countryside outside Berlin. Adding to the richness of the project, she has invited two other practices, MAIO and Dogma, to make contributions.
The monastery is of course one of the oldest architectural typologies, a microcosm of the world with smaller units—monks’ cells—clustering about larger communal volumes—spaces for praying, reading, eating, bathing, and healing. Such designs flourish at the nexus of Alberti’s vision, six centuries ago, of the city as a great house and the house as a small city. It offers the hope of new structures to foster physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing.
Representation and Gathering
“Present” as a noun can mean the present time—the here and now—or a gift. The verb “present” means to show or perform.
An architecture that is present likely has materiality and character, the latter kindled by the former, as with the walls of rammed earth that give the lakeside villa at Ajijic its distinctive identity. To be present means also to be alive and alert to actions including potential growth and change. There’s something organic is this sensibility, a distrust of the dryly logical, as with those post-War self-critical Modernists, and a pleasure in the local and aleatory.
The structure of Bilbao’s Casa Ventura, for example, has both a technical rationale, accommodating a family on a steeply sloping side above Monterrey, and a distinct esthetic that recalls groves of trees, stone outcrops, and other phenomena encountered in nature. In Culiacán, the reorganization of the Botanical Gardens emerged, alongside attention to sustainability, from conceptualizing the new system of pathways and small nodal structures as a botanical specimen itself.
Something similar is evident in the ways in which Bilbao and her team present their work. The focus or emphasis is seldom on a single glorified, isolated object. They have developed an informal methodology of line drawings, as likely to represent architectural components and domestic utensils as any single building. And they have become proficient in the use of colorful collages that depict buildings in a kind of ludic Cubist environment, architecture in reciprocity with nature, context, narrative, and people going about their lives.
The purpose of this genial scenography is not simply to represent buildings in their totality. Bilbao’s collages function to communicate with multiple publics who might, thereby, see themselves within the architectural project. Explore, for instance, the complex collages made for the Staterra proposal for Los Cabos, or Hunters Point in San Francisco, or the Silica II – Roble 700 residential complex planned for Monterrey.
Compare this concern for complexity and representation with the anonymity and homogeneity of the technically sophisticated renderings now so ubiquitous in the architecture profession and the international property business. Indeed, Bilbao refuses to use many of these programs as they result in a strange homogenization of the built environment and the ways we may think about it.
Bilbao’s experimentation with representation (a word, of course, with “present” at its center) shares her desire to communicate and evoke with a concern for recognizable or memorable forms in the built work. Consider the architect’s insistence that the Acuña prototypical housing (with an upper budget limit of $8,000) include at least some pitched roofs so that residents can associate with their specific units and with notions of domesticity and comfort.
She is characteristically interested in how publics register, identify with, and use architectural work.
With the equipment in Van Eyck’s playgrounds, with the tiled benches at Utzon’s house on Mallorca, with the expansive spiral stairs Bo Bardi constructed in her Salvador museum, we encounter places to linger and interact. In her exhibition and installation design, Bilbao works to also offer us moments of communality and gathering. To be human.
In exhibitions such as Perspectives at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO) in 2017 or Tatiana Bilbao Estudio at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art two years later, visitors encountered an entire world of the architects’ creation; or, more correctly, entire worlds with elements ranging in scale from the most basic building component to infrastructure, interconnected and brought to life in settings that also encouraged lingering and interaction.
Exhibitions, for Bilbao, are occasions that mix the scientific and the celebratory. That sense of inquiry and community informs Bilbao’s exhibition, City of Rooms, at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art. More than usual, this architect and her team want to engage you, the reader and the viewer, in comprehending the intent of their projects, the embeddedness of architecture and design in our world, and the inescapable fact that everything is always more than one thing.
This text was first published in the February 2024 issue of a+u titled “Tatiana Bilbao Estudio: Platforms for Life.”
To purchase a physical copy of this issue, please visit au-magazine.com.
Raymund Ryan is curator-at-large of the Heinz Architectural Center at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. A graduate of University College Dublin and Yale School of Architecture, Ryan was the first Irish Commissioner for the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2000; 2002). He has contributed to many catalogues and magazines, including a+u, Blueprint, The Architectural Review, and The Plan.
