Disrupting Housing: New Paradigms in Mexican Collective Living

Panel: Luís Aldrete; Anonimous + G3 (Alfonso Enciso and Alfonso Garduño); Héctor Barroso; El Cielo (Surella Segú and Armando Hashimoto); Ambrosi Etchegaray (Jorge Ambrosi and Gabriela Etchegaray); Macías Peredo (Salvador Macías and Magui Peredo); MMX (Diego Ricalde); and Re Urbano (Rodrigo Rivero-Borrell and Alberto Kritzler)

Thursday and Friday, March 5 - 6, 1:00 p.m. – 7: 00 p.m.

Admission is free and open to the public. Registration is encouraged.

To register for Day 1 of the symposium on March 5, click here.

To register for Day 2 of the symposium on March 6, click here.

In the last decade, Mexican architecture has experienced a renaissance and gained unparalleled attention internationally. This is now also true in the case of collective housing, where the work of a generation of talented young architects has been fueled by a housing boom and aided by a series of progressive public initiatives, including but not limited to those of Infonavit, yielding a series of exemplary projects remarkable in their inventiveness and sheer quality. Housing in the United States is on the other hand caught in between serious issues of affordability in its main metropolitan areas and a series of development formulas inherited from previous decades that seem increasingly exhausted and incapable of responding to contemporary challenges.

With this larger context and keeping transfer of knowledge in mind as an aim, this symposium will examine the golden moment in Mexican housing, in order to learn from its specific take on a series of issues including sustainability, labor, social responsibility, as well as new models of density and development formats. By gathering a group of academics and practitioners, the symposium proposes to look at this historic phenomenon through the triple lenses of its framing (policy), implementation (design), and dissemination (education and architectural pedagogy).

For information regarding visitor parking on the Rice campus, please visit parking.rice.edu.

Disrupting Housing: New Paradigms in Mexican Collective Living, organized by Gus Wortham Assistant Professor Jesús Vassallo, is generously funded by the Puentes Consortium through its Seminars and Research Grants Program, with additional support by the Rice University Humanities Research Center, Rice Architecture, and Rice Design Alliance.