2. tatiana bilbao
tatiana bilbao
I have studied contemporary works identified through the past three cycles of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize of Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao to understand the cultural and architectural contexts of Mexico. Through drawing, research, close analysis of works, and an interview with Tatina Bilbao, I have been able to share my findings through narrative and collage.
A love story....
The past two years, my attitude toward architecture has been positively influenced, and I began to view it with a different perspective. I’ve had the opportunity to be taught by great mentors that exposed me to a human-centered approach toward architecture. It is conscious architecture that puts people first and foremost.
Tatiana Bilbao embodies humanistic architecture and integrates her philosophy and social values through design. Closely analyzing a body of her work, I was able to learn about Tatiana’s social principles that are evidently ingrained in her designs.
The projects were explained through stories that powerfully narrate the architecture and reveal the vision that personifies the body of work and message of a social consciousness toward design and the built environment. It is the principle of architecture, “the understanding of making places and spaces by people for people,”-Tatiana Bilbao.
To design spaces for people, there’s a need to understand who will inhabit the space. “We design for specific people,” Tatiana shares with me as she speaks about housing, the field she is most passionate about. To personalize and curate the space, there is a need to design for the individual. As she explained to me, yes, we all share the same basic necessities, but we are all different; “There aren’t any homogenous solutions, because each of us are completely different from each other.” Each individual defines “necessities” differently, as well as having a different set of aspirations, wants, and needs. We discussed the challenge in architecture today of how to design for individuality in a collective. Tatiana then asked, “How do we design for diversity to accept diversity?” which she then answers, “I don’t have an answer.” That is where the challenge lies, how to express individuality and celebrate that every individual is different, and have the architecture reflect that? The architecture becomes an identity.
Tatiana explains how she tried to achieve this with the reconstruction of the earthquake in Ciudad Acuña. Tatiana expresses the importance of identity- “It’s important to have a neighborhood, a connected community, and a place where you can identify with.” She explains how informal neighborhoods express this because it’s built with the community’s hands, representing their possibilities and desires. So the question is how do we help people achieve their ideal way of living in a desirable space? “Give them the tools to create, so they can create their own environment and design their own space,” Tatiana explains. Looking at architecture through this lens, the design equation does not just rely on the architect, but it also involves the inhabitant to be an active participant who takes part in the design process. We merely can become an instrument to help people achieve their ideal way of living without imposing our way of living.
With this understanding, I can see how evident this strategy is with the social housing project in Acuña. Tatiana designed a modular home to be flexible and adaptable. ‘Housing +’ has been adapted to different environmental, economical, and social factors. It’s built to be flexible and to respond to the different needs of each family. A pitched roof, archetypical form of the house, was the ideal design due to what the people wanted- an appearance of a finished home. Although it may appear finished from the outside, it is not. It was designed to allow for the possibilities of growth. In this project you can see how Tatiana is trying to be an instrument to the inhabitants to allow them to create their own environment and design their space- “people building their own habitats and the architect being just one part of the process.”
This consciousness of not imposing a way of living, habit, or behavior is a constant in Tatiana’s principles. This same idea gave her inspiration to design the master plan of the botanical garden located in Culiacan, Mexico. Tatiana explained how important this project was, especially since the garden existed, “this garden is a very important place for the urban and social tissue of the city in many ways. I understood that it was not only a botanical garden, but it was a place for representation, identification, and an icon in the city.” That is what made it a challenge, because such a place requires delicate and conscious intervention. Tatiana told me the yoga story, which gave her all the ideas and direction for the project. She explained how she wanted to do a yoga pavilion and when she said that, the gardener at the botanical garden looked at her in a weird way- “This guy doesn’t really understand. Yoga happens here everyday. People do yoga, pilates, and dance.” With such activity there needs to be programs, schedules, and other such implications that come about. At that moment when Tatiana was thinking about all the details of such a program she realized, “this is going to kill the activity. There is no way. How can you think that you can impose anything there without really taking the importance of it.” The intervention strategy blossomed- small interventions that would activate the new program and “would be kind enough with the environment to not interfere with what’s already good and try to enhance the existing and honor it.” In order to do so, the program was exploded into parts and scattered across the garden- so as not to impose a single thing and be sensible to act in spaces that would not break the equilibrium, but to enhance it.” Each program across the site is represented in its rawest and simplest form. “They are what you see. They are concrete shells,” Tataina explained the programmatic buildings they designed. “They are their own structure, their own insulation, and their final aesthetic definition.” They are designed the way they are to create the most productive dialogue in the botanical garden.
Tatiana’s project had me thinking about the importance of dialogue in architecture. Dialogue with one another, the built and natural environment. Sustaining such complex relationships can be explored through various ways, and the botanical garden is just one way. To look at architecture with a perspective like so, allows for a bountiful of opportunities and possibilities to be discovered.
Through the exploration and analysis of Tatiana’s work, I am looking at architecture with a fresh mindset. A mindset that elevates the consciousness of human centered approach, and prioritizes and articulates the individual in design. With the last project I studied, the Pilgrimage route, located in Ameca-Talpa, Jalisco, Mexico, is the embodiment of these adjectives: honesty, awareness, consciousness, capabilities, understanding, and limitations.The masterplan for this project was designed and consisted of an ecological corridor with infrastructure and architectural pieces that were followed along the route. Tatiana explained to me that this project, “is one of the projects that I think we never understood. It is also learning, we architects tend to think that we can understand every context that we build. We are not able to understand one single context that we build besides where we have grown up and lived.” With this project in particular, the message behind it resonated with me most because it was very honest. Tatiana shared with me what she discovered throughout this process and it was being more honest and understanding of our own limitations. “We architects tend to think that we have the solutions for everything and change everything.” Be honest with yourself, know your limitations, and understand that you do not have the solutions for everybody.
This has me thinking about how architecture can begin to be articulated with an honest representation, and that begins with an introspective assessment of oneself, one’s capabilities, limitations, and understandings.
Tatiana Biblao’s work in contemporary architecture in Mexico today, is a representation of a human-centered approach to architecture. It is the emphasis of “making places and spaces by people for people.” Her philosophy and ethics are ingrained in her work. It is architecture that prioritizes the human experience and designs for the specific individual.