taller mgl ° °

Programme heads:

Maite Garcia-Lascurain, Naso Vargas 

Students:

Arjun Modayur (usa), Catalina Cabral Framiñan (usa/arg/mex), Christian Sievers (ger/mex), Delia Ștefania Cazan (rum), Jimena Orvañanos (mex), María José García Martínez (mex), Sofia Manuelovna Perez Kremko (rus/mex), Mateo Niño Ibarra (mex), Oscar Schlesinger (usa), Pablo Sañudo Rojas (mex), Samuel Urrutia (col), Sonya Thye (ger)

The Architectural Association’s (AA) Summer School returned to Mexico City with an intensive three-week programme bringing together creatives from Latin America and beyond to explore the city through observation, experimentation and collaboration. Rooted in the AA’s tradition of experimental architectural education, the programme took Mexico City as both context and classroom. Through urban explorations, collective research, and conversations with architects and artists, students investigated the contradictions, rhythms and unexpected forms of ingenuity embedded in everyday urban life.

The programme culminated in a collective installation – or a dinner party – designed and built with students: a spatial response distilled from three weeks of observing, recording and interpreting the city. Rather than representing Mexico City literally, the project translates recurring urban conditions into space, drawing particularly on moments of compression and decompression; the oscillation between the sensory intensity of the streets and the unexpected moments of calm that punctuate them.

The installation also draws from the surprising beauty of industrial materials found in tianguis and informal constructions, where utility, improvisation and resourcefulness become an aesthetic language of their own. At its core, the project celebrates a distinctly Mexican culture of making: the ability to improvise, assemble from almost nothing, and approach uncertainty with an optimistic «¿y si sí?» embracing experimentation over perfection.

The result is both installation and gathering: a constellation of objects, rituals and shared encounters enveloped by a translucent skin. Less an exhibition than an invitation, it creates a space to sit together, observe, converse and, for a brief moment, inhabit the city differently.

Provecho.