Mexico as an independent and authoritative laboratory for the architecture of its time is not just a matter of recent years. In fact, Mexican architecture has always been contemporary, thanks to its history and the values that have underpinned it from the very beginning; and for more than a century it has exercised its authority on a global scale. It is no coincidence that names such as Luis Barragán, in the modern period, or Tatiana Bilbao more recently, are often perceived as cultural references on form and the relationship between space and humans. 

Living is where these values are expressed, with ever-changing experiments, in the work of different emerging and established professional realities. It is about an organicist sensitivity to local materials, but above all to the natural resources of a landscape that suggests strategies of sustainability and comfort; it is about a quest for innovation in form, where a centuries-old depth is transported from time to time in geometric abstraction, in simplicity as the basis of a joy of living, in emphasizing a somehow plastic brutalism, or in a visual generosity that aims at uniqueness. 

Individual houses, collective housing, urban landscape enriched by new episodes, social living, isolated living in contact with nature: we have selected 15 projects that illustrate such complexity among those recently published on Domus.

Five meters by twenty, closed on three sides, is a stringent constraint for a lot that has to house a new villa. Even though working with empty space may appear the obliged choice to bring light and air to the interiors, the patio designed by Práctica Arquitectura fits poetically within a system of full and empty spaces that make this house in Monterrey a powerful architectural organism. In the yard, the limit between inside and outside, room and corridor, pausing and moving, seems to dissolve and succeed in generating a unified sequence of different spaces. Read more

We can start looking at House VO/WO, a project by Ludwig Godefroy Architecture studio, through the lens of a most important Mexican reference: Barragan’s houses, in their precise geometry, capable of systemizing vegetation, light, and shadow. Here, the forms of the house are almost abstract elements, in which cuts, inclinations, and openings contain continuous sequences between inside and outside. Read more

The restoration of Casa Mar Mediterraneo 34 is a project that focuses on the recovery of an eclectic villa built between the 19th and 20th centuries by revitalizing its image and renovating its way of living. The project envisages the restoration of the existing volume, bringing the body facing the road back to its former glory. The studio imagined rehabilitating the image and urban presence of the house, whose additions take place back in the lot. Read more

In San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Associates Architecture designs a monolithic and introverted residence, combining the typical spatialities of vernacular architecture with the sophisticated style of 20th century masters. Read More