For Mexican architect Fernando Romero, innovation is achieved through the reinterpretation of traditional forms and techniques. Domus presents three recent projects, in China and Mexico, designed by his office LAR Photography by Iwan Baan Text by Lucy Bullivant. Edited by Joseph Grima, Karen Marta

Translation as innovation
Lucy Bullivant

For Fernando Romero, one of Mexico’s most prolific young architects, “the current challenge is to understand the global without ignoring the local”. For this reason his first point of reference is the work of Luis Barragán, whose work he deems to be permeated by an insatiable appetite for blending cultures through the synthesis of local resources (“translating traditions”, as Romero puts it). Romero founded LCM (Laboratory of Mexico City) in 1999 after five years working for other practices, including OMA and Jean Nouvel, in Europe. LCM runs local projects while LAR (Laboratory of Architecture) concentrates on the mediation of issues through research, books, competitions and architectural experiments.

Romero thrives on a simultaneous set of diversified activities. A developer’s boom has given Mexico City’s young architectural practices the opportunity to cut their teeth especially in the residential sector, but Romero feels there is a risk of genericism if an office’s output grows too rapidly. Commissions for dwellings have been “a constant research project into a diverse range of spatial conditions” for the practice, a process that began in 1995 while Romero was preparing his thesis project in his final year at the Universidad Iberoamericana. In this project, a house design for the Portuguese poet Pessoa was generated as a translation of four literary personas whose voices crop up in his works.

“Houses are both the most simple and most complex projects one can realise – one of the most challenging design exercises I have faced,” says Romero. As a field with scope for greater freedom than commercial buildings, it has been the focal point of his interest, and one which he has developed primarily through an exploration of organic forms. In Mexico he is able to take advantage of affordable craftwork and considerable flexibility in local building regulations to realise custom-designed houses of biomorphic or geometric inspiration. Romero is not interested in skeletons or high tech environments.

“One of the qualities of Modernism was aesthetics but not space.” Organic forms have long been a theme of Romero’s work. When commissioned to design a summer house for artist Gabriel Orozco in 1997, he built hundreds of hypothetical models, usually from small pieces of clay. The final design (a rounded, perforated shell) was never built, but two years later Romero did get the opportunity to realise an organic structure for a house with a continuous snail-shell structure. The brief was to design an extension to a typical suburban, mid-century modernist villa in Mexico City as a playhouse for the client’s children. A staircase winds up from the garden into to the intimate inner sanctum of the shell. Instead of a cave-style dwelling, natural light suffuses the space through small apertures puncturing the roof.

The structure brings together high tech construction methodologies such as laser-cut steel beams with relatively cheap, local craft-based techniques. The hand filing and polishing gave precision to the shell’s geometrical curves and inclines, accentuating the contrast between the mysterious, hermetic gleaming white volume, and the house it extends. In the same year, Romero designed the Ixtapa beach house, another of his early domestic buildings. Like some primitive grotto, it feels as if it has grown organically out of its natural context. Positioned on the edge of the Pacific coastline, its striking open living space offers a contemplative niche of privacy open to the ocean, behind which an array of nine bedrooms opens up.

The “palapa”, or Mexican beach house, is customarily constructed with wood columns supporting a high palm leaf roof which allows sea breezes to ventilate the interior. Romero’s design retains the plein air nature of the structure. The communal living room is a continuous open volume drawn into proximity with the water through a mouth-like, 22-metre-wide aperture that faces the sea. With this privileged marine view and the fluid lines of its open plan, the interior character is both public and intimate. Villa S, currently under construction on the edge of Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park, is a semi-organic steel structure whose section resembles the branches of a tree. Unlike conventional houses that rest their full mass on the ground, Romero wanted to reduce the footprint on the gently sloping site by compressing the “trunk” where the living space is located.

All the smaller, private areas of the villa spring out in an arc from this communal space, emphasising the structure’s aesthetic of dynamic horizontality. Deep and wide foundations were needed to support the cantilevered “branches” that enclose the living spaces; below ground, structural “roots” enclose a group of labyrinthine rooms carved out of the solid concrete basement. The relationship between the programme and the topography of the house creates protected vantage spaces: a south-facing picture window overlooking the garden, and a rooftop terrace providing views of the garden and the park.

Thanks to the avant-garde yet profoundly humanistic nature of its design, as well as the effective use of local craftwork and materials, Villa S promises to be one of Romero’s most exceptional custom-designed houses to date. A systematised structural frame engaging the natural context is the concept behind the Bridging Teahouse (2006), one of the pavilions in the Architecture Park created by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in collaboration with Jinhua City Municipality and Herzog & de Meuron [see Domus 894]. Set between the pavilions of Michael Maltzan and Herzog & de Meuron overlooking a river, the design unifies the bridge and the teahouse into a single concrete structure, both common features of a traditional Chinese garden. This intimate structure dedicated to the genteel and ancient habit of tea-drinking comprises a number of separate platforms and secluded spaces; some are intended to offer couples privacy, while others are for families, and others still allow easy access for the elderly.

“The division between these different individual ‘cells’ acts as the structural framework that allows the pavilion to span the pond,” says Romero. Like Mexico, China is a country where construction, especially outside the corporate imperative dominant in the cities, is essentially a low tech affair. The techniques used to make the bridge are very similar to those applied by the teams of artisans that built Romero’s earlier small buildings in Mexico through the ingenious employment of craftsmanship and hand tools. The bridge, both as a physical structure and potent metaphor of connection, is a recurring theme in Romero’s output. The most potent application of the concept in his work to date is a proposal for a bridge linking Mexico and the United States that would also house a museum of immigration dedicated to the migratory flows between the two countries.

The proposed museum would be the first such cultural structure to stand in two countries simultaneously. Designed in 2000, the year the two countries established new agreements concerning their mutual relations, it sets an equal monolithic volume of construction in each country. This is compressed into an angular form at the midpoint of the Rio Bravo, the location of the real geographic border. Since 9/11, when the fight against terrorism as opposed to bi-national collaboration became the focus of political priorities in the States, the bridge has remained an unrealised metaphorical project.

But Romero’s interest in this most active of international divides remains, and LCM’s forthcoming publication, Hyperborder 2050, will offer a panoramic overview of this complex theme, anticipating a border paradigm heavily impacted by increasingly polarised political and economic circumstances. While his earlier publication ZMVM (Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México) graphically represented the challenges of urban life in Mexico City, the Hyperborder project will investigate the border’s impact on economies, politics, health, development, environment, urbanism and education. Romero, who steered this project, plays both the card of architect and urban reformer.

Museo Soumaya Ciudad de México
The Soumaya Museum in Mexico City showcases the works of one of Mexico’s most important private collections. On show to the public in a temporary location in Plaza Loreto, the collection comprises the largest number of works by master sculptor Auguste Rodin anywhere outside France, including examples of The Kiss and The Thinker, as well as a display of objects from the Mexican colonial period and numerous portraits from the same era. The commission for a new headquarters for the Soumaya Museum involves a considerable expansion of the institution’s current activities, as well as of the collection itself. The new building will have a total surface area of 15,000 m2, and will comprise not only exhibition spaces but also an auditorium and conference centre, an extensive library, offices, underground parking and retail space. As well as exhibition space for the permanent collection, the new Soumaya Museum will have free floorplans so as to be able to host a range of temporary, thematic exhibits. The shiny, mushroom-like tower of the Museum rises from a sloped plaza open to pedestrians. Most of the works in the permanent collection are extremely delicate and must be protected from daylight. The building’s curved skin is clad in frosted glass that diffuses the sun’s rays and prevents them from damaging the artworks.

Villa S Ciudad de México
The section of this single-family house in Mexico City resembles the section of a tree. The “roots”, large steel beams reaching deep underground, enclose a volume almost as large as that of the house above ground. Services and storage space are accommodated in this basement area. The narrowest part of the building, the “trunk”, is the living space: this the most public area of the dwelling and the only one that makes contact with the ground level of the surrounding landscape. Large glass panels create a sense of uninterrupted continuity between the living room and the garden. All the more private rooms of the villa are suspended above ground and float around the central living room. The entrance to the house is sunken slightly below the level of the surrounding garden to emphasise the dramatic effect of the cantilevers and the sculptural form of the house during the approach. At the end of a walk through the house, the visitor reaches the rooftop, where a secluded terrace offers views of the garden and towards the adjacent park. The house’s elongated form is partly determined by constraints imposed by local planning regulations, which limited the building’s maximum height to nine metres. According to the architect, however, the realisation of such a bold design is only possible in the context of a country like Mexico where highly skilled, specialised labour is relatively cheap and building codes are permissive, yet technologically advanced materials and components are available thanks to the proximity of the USA.