Disrupting Housing: New Paradigms in Mexican Collective Living, a symposium organized by Rice Architecture Gus Wortham Assistant Professor Jesús Vassallo, will explore Mexican contemporary housing in the larger context of the challenges faced in the U.S. and globally today. The symposium takes place Thursday and Friday, March 5 - 6, from 1:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m., in Farish Gallery, Anderson Hall, at Rice University.
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 the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers (Infonavit), yielding a series of exemplary projects remarkable in their inventiveness and sheer quality. Housing in the United States, on the other hand, is caught 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,” said Vassallo.
“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),” he said.
The symposium features presentations by Luís Aldrete, Anonimous + G3, Héctor Barroso, El Cielo, Ambrosi Etchegaray, Macías Peredo, MMX, and Re Urbano.
Admission is free and open to the public. Registration is encouraged. To register for day one of the symposium, click here. To register for day two of the symposium, click here.
Disrupting Housing: New Paradigms in Mexican Collective Living is generously funded by the Puentes Consortium, with additional support by the Rice University Humanities Research Center, Rice Architecture, and Rice Design Alliance.