PRODUCTORA

The word kaleidoscope derives from the amalgamation of the Greek words kalos (“beautiful”) and eidos (“form”). PRODUCTORA intends this publication to be a kaleidoscopic capture—at times, close-up, at times, from more distant vantage points—of their recent built work. In stating that, they refer to the book’s structure—neither hierarchical nor thematic, chronological yet non-exhaustive—but the term is fitting in another sense. The actual form of this volume is carefully considered: a quietly elegant, super-tactile binding of immersive carpetas (carpeta = “folder” in Spanish) dedicated to individual projects, informative but equally impressionistic, elusive. It is the result of a measured process—in close dialogue with designer Roger Willems—of subtraction and rearrangement, combined with a dose of meticulous, creative deliberation that could be labeled intuitive (more on such gestures, a PRODUCTORA trait, below). Given their common authorship, it seems redundant to suggest that, in its thought-out logic and degree of capriciousness, the book mirrors the works presented in it. More importantly, its organization serves two motives: to convey PRODUCTORA’s belief in the autonomy of each project and to oppose the persistent need for categorization and globally applicable orders. At the same time, the design allows for compelling continuities to emerge, by designed accident, as elements meet and recur across spreads, producing a beguiling panoply of odd pairings and surprising resonances.

PRODUCTORA began almost incidentally, when four friends who met while working at the same firm started collaborating and sharing a side office in Mexico City’s Colonia Condesa. In 2006, Carlos Bedoya, Wonne Ickx, Victor Jaime and Abel Perles decided to make the partnership official. While their way of working together has evolved and consolidated with time, in many ways it remains as idiosyncratic and gut-driven as in those early years. Surely the peculiar constellation quadruples the group’s productivity, but just as notably, PRODUCTORA’s projects aren’t shared evenly among the quartet. It is tempting to surmise this arrangement accounts for the polyvalent nature of the studio’s output—no two projects look or speak alike. The variety, however, also stems from the firm’s resistance to stand for some kind of absolute “Mexican” architecture, possibly a reaction to a local history that is as exceptional as it can be limiting.

Up until the 1990s, architecture in Mexico was dominated by the ghosts of Barragán, Legorreta, Ramirez Vazquez and González de León—20th-century giants who embraced monumentality to help construct a nation’s modern identity. PRODUCTORA can be seen as a bridge between the generation that broke with those forefathers—Kalach, Broid and Norten—and the current wave of building design, one that favors a language more attuned to Mexico’s material and economic reality and perhaps makes too much ado about its purportedly handmade, earthen qualities. (It’s critical to note what PRODUCTORA smartly chose not to become, considering the workplace that brought them together: yet another harbinger of design’s big, parametric fantasy.)

If it’s easy to situate PRODUCTORA in a lineage of a country’s traditions and ruptures, it proves more challenging to encapsulate how their contribution to today’s built landscape reverberates beyond Latin America. Even though the studio’s architecture appears simple and straightforward, it rarely really is. In fact, PRODUCTORA relishes operating in gaps: between representation and manifest presence; between the quotidian and the high-minded; between rigorous deduction and methodical whim. Geometry is the firm’s calling card, but behind the Euclidean proclivity there is a desire—no, a necessity—to confound, question and counter.

Take the studio’s name, which in Spanish refers to a production company, a term borrowed from filmmaking. The choice evinces a kind of contrarian pragmatism, and indeed PRODUCTORA shows little interest in what is fashionable or expected. For its first decade, the firm built mostly smaller, often residential, projects, though it was evident their ultimate interest lay in complex public buildings. At its core, PRODUCTORA has always been about making buildings that can be sensed and inhabited while changing the relational qualities of a town or neighborhood.

The practical slant notwithstanding, it would be disingenuous to say PRODUCTORA’s work is not cerebral. That may sound surprising—the studio likes to emphasize its interest in physical objects. In fact, to the extent thinking about architecture matters to PRODUCTORA, and it does greatly, it’s always in the service of a tangible end result rather than for its own sake. It’s an ethos with laudable, grounded integrity: out of ideas, intuitions and influences, create lastingly substantial structures that can be used—by a citizen, a client or civilization at large.

Spanning 17 projects realized between 2014 and 2022, the book starts at the veritable navel of PRODUCTORA’s hometown, Mexico City’s historic Zocalo square, where the studio’s design for an ephemeral pavilion took the form of an exuberant forest of cross-braces befitting the baroque context. It ends with a converted textile factory, where a shade of green taken from looms found on-site denotes an intervention so minimal it appears invisible. In between, there are homes, plazas, auditoriums and community centers. More importantly, there is a plethora of situations—a private library, staircases, open rooftops and covered patios. In other words, abundant typologies, shapes and precedents to be assimilated and redefined.

It all truly is kaleidoscopic, perhaps lacking a common thread at first glance. A varied selection of writings accompany the visuals for each project. Between texts by PRODUCTORA’s founding partners—by turns poetic, precise, practical and personal in tone—oblique contributions by friends, actual and in spirit, exemplify the studio’s unburdened ability to appropriate pertinent references that explain aspects of its work, the same way its buildings quote great moments in architecture without the grandiloquence usually connected to such sampling. (PRODUCTORA’s work is knowing to a fault, but never precious about it.) In their totality, these pages reflect the gamut of a rising firm’s foibles and virtues at this, still early, stage of its existence.

Eventually, patterns emerge. Foremost is a geometric rigor created by an internal, iterative order. PRODUCTORA achieves this pristine template through a relentless quest to refine a set of variables to its most essential configuration. As single-minded as this search is, it also prizes friction over perfection, revealing another inherent gap. The studio’s work exists in the space between conceptual, mathematical purity and something far less predetermined: the arbitrariness of reality. This is where that all-important gesture comes in, a compositional conceit that interferes with and upends the graphic clarity. Within a framework of carefully imposed rules, PRODUCTORA inserts an auteurist choice that saves the design from diagrammatic genericity and reasserts the architect’s agency at a time when it’s often called into question.

Complicating matters, however—because predictability is anathema to PRODUCTORA’s project—is the fact that anything can be a pretext for disruption: a condition, a thought, an accident, an insignificant detail found nearby. Regardless, it’s never a gimmick; instead, the studio’s penchant for opposition stems from its insistently realist outlook. As a modus operandi, the off-center sleight acknowledges the impossibility of translating abstract notions into real physical objects that must relate to space and context, especially in a place like Mexico. And so, a through-line comes to light: All projects included in this book rewrite their environment by means of a small, intentional misalignment, resulting in new possible readings of those surroundings. Given circumstances inform each of these designs, of course, but it’s invariably something not preordained that lends each project its distinct character and makes it a work of consequence.

Frequently, PRODUCTORA’s objects lose their idealized state the second they touch the ground. A building’s inscription into its site (or, alternately, the manner it rises from it) is a recurring concern. Whether in Yucatan’s jungle or the gentrified enclaves of Los Angeles, the firm’s works are shaped in part by the precise topography of a place (unrealized PRODUCTORA projects have also included proposals for buried buildings). Nowhere are the ideas of architecture as constructed ground and as a continuation of existing land as apparent as at Teopanzolco, where the terrain happens to incorporate an archaeological site. In typical manner, the project is also an exercise in extreme geometry. The auditorium recycles the foundations of a preexisting structure, extending it and superimposing it with two triangles. As the larger triangle effectively disappears into the ground, the smaller, opposite-facing volume on top of it enacts a direct relationship with the Aztec pyramid. Still, one would be remiss to believe the design is about triangles. Just as with the studio’s grids and squares, the applied geometry’s primary function is to circumscribe a central idea that basks in its infinite potential.

It is a similar story with color. Early on, PRODUCTORA buildings tended to be white, an implicit, purist negation, erasing memory, detail and any helpful sense of scale. In recent years, chromatic bursts are increasingly part of the studio’s toolbox, a concession to the difficulty of achieving a natural pigmentation when building with a more industrial palette of materials. A Colorado housing estate is the most conspicuous example of the color spectrum deployed across sites to codify, unify, anchor, cover up, highlight, give depth, blend in, contour and contrast. Paradoxically, what could be misinterpreted as a nod to the scenographic use of color prevalent in so-called emotional architecture is, in fact, in line with the guiding goal to address rather than disguise conditions. “Paint is paint and shouldn’t fake being anything else, let alone something organic,” PRODUCTORA’s application of color seems to be saying. It is just one more parameter in a consistently assiduous objective-subjective composition of space.

If the idea of transforming space through simple, intelligent, unexpected gestures is what drives PRODUCTORA, the studio thrives in a sea of sources and influences. It has a voracious capacity to absorb and give new meaning to anything it finds valid and relevant to the production of novel, thought-provoking architecture: telescope houses, gabled roofs, diagonality, the semiotics of how a home operates. Neither are Bedoya et al. bashful about their heroes; their avowed inspirational pantheon is eclectic and long. Rossi, Stirling, Hejduk, Ungers and Tange are among a rotating roster of historic examples. PRODUCTORA summons these references selectively and pragmatically. If a dead master’s formal strategy is useful, it’s fair game, without the need to be overly reverential or copy the model completely. It’s rarely about paying tribute, but about emulating solutions that have only gotten better with time.

And yet, the best influences would be worthless without the studio’s main asset: the four minds at its helm and their uncanny chemistry. The quality and breadth of PRODUCTORA’s oeuvre to date exceed the sum of its four partners’ talents. Thanks to this fortuitous union, PRODUCTORA has produced an emphatically un-formulaic architecture based on a few basic convictions: That generous spatial experiences can be created through disciplined questioning and daring experimentation. That formal ambition is possible without resorting to gratuitously spectacular shapes. That thoughtful architecture composed of contrast and wit can be potently atemporal. And that a building can be clearly legible and easy to use for anyone, while reserving a level of elaborate complexity and even a sense of the abstruse for those who care about such things.

In creating buildings that function, delight, stimulate and are likely to withstand tectonic fads as well as telluric shifts, all without ever compromising the restless intellectual curiosity at its heart, PRODUCTORA is the rare architecture studio that can have its cake and eat it too. This book is both a compendium and a promise of this singularity: a survey of the groundwork laid out over a decade and a presage of what is possible as these foundations continue to be built upon.