Spotlight on Tatiana Bilbao

She comes from a generation of extremely talented Mexican architects and is a member of an extensive family of architects. Hailing from Mexico City, Tatiana Bilbao is giving this year’s ‘Architecture Speech’ at the literature and music festival in Ostwestfalen-Lippe at FSB’s invitation. On Friday, 21 July 2017, she will present her work at the Marta Herford Museum. Tatiana Bilbao did not actually want to be an architect at all.

Too many of her family were already working in the field: an aunt and uncle were architects, as were just under twelve of her cousins. Bilbao's grandfather, Tomás Bilbao, was even an architect, working as the Minister of Construction in the Second Spanish Republic. Franco’s coup forced him and his family into exile and they fled to Mexico City, which evolved into a left-wing liberal centre for art and science at the time, as a new home to many Spanish-speaking emigrants.

Born in Mexico City in 1972, Tatiana Bilbao wanted to escape the family’s calling, but her industrial design degree in Milan was only a brief interlude before she went to the Universidad Iberoamericana to study architecture in the Mexican capital.

She graduated in 1996, right at the end of a long economic crisis in Mexico that had forced almost every private architectural firm in the country to close its doors. ‘Back then, architecture was a luxury that no one wanted to afford,’ Bilbao recalls. She herself only felt the pain of this phase through her family’s experiences. Bilbao worked in the Secretariat of Urban Development and Housing of Mexico City for just under two years, also organising lecture series and conferences at her former university with international architects like Álvaro Siza, Rem Koolhaas and Tadao Ando. Then in 1999 she and Fernando Romero, who graduated in 1971, founded their LCM collective, the Laboratorio de la Ciudad de Mexico, where they created mostly study projects. As the orders they received steadily rose, the two partners parted ways amicably, each founding their own firms which are now among the most internationally known in Mexico.

Together with Derek Dellekamp, Frida Escobedo and Michel Rojkind, Romero and Bilbao are part of an extremely remarkable group that can be described as Mexico’s most talented generation of architects, given such spectacular buildings like the Museo Soumaya (Romero), the Cineteca Nacional (Rohkind) and La Tallera Siqueiros (Escobedo). If you were to assign every member of this Mexican generation a certain role as if they were in a TV show, Tatiana Bilbao would probably play the part of the wise woman, who everyone turns to for her thoughtful, apt opinion. The preference for grandiose displays – a common recurrence with others in the field – is almost completely absent in her architecture. Only the two very first projects her own firm did, an exhibition pavilion in China and the first phase of construction in the Botanical Garden of Culiacán (both in 2007), still stood out with rather jagged, fragmented forms and a slightly deconstructionist appearance.

It invited direct comparisons of Bilbao with Zaha Hadid. But beyond the all-too simple categories of ‘woman’ and ‘deconstruction’, there are few parallels between Tatiana Bilbao and the effervescent British winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

What separates Bilbao most from Hadid is the fact that she does not make signature buildings; she does not make buildings with a distinctly recognisable mark that puts the architect and their always-consistent approach to design at the forefront. Instead, Bilbao conducts research from the ground up at every project location and for every job, looking for the right approach and the right design strategy. As a result, her portfolio is full of surprises: there’s the Ajijic house (2011) with its soft, reddish gleaming rammed earth walls, directly next to the Ventura house (also 2011) with its nested, often angled individual rooms, crashing into each other inside and out with a cool, tough exposed concrete aesthetic. There’s the university building in Cancún (2013) with its stacked cubes and facade of steel and glass, followed by a spiralled, gleaming white ‘Spectacle Centre’ in Irapuato (2014), the design of which was inspired by a guachimontón, or circular ‘pyramid’ structure, in nearby Teuchitlán. Is it that she is afraid of repeating herself all too quickly as an architect, overplaying the same style? No, says Bilbao, she never intended to create buildings that were as different as possible.

Instead, she insists on researching every project location and its building traditions as precisely as possible in her architecture: what’s being produced nearby, who will construct the building, how are buildings traditionally constructed in the area? This field research gives rise to a variety of forms, materials and construction methods. The rammed earth construction of the Ajijic house not only helped to keep the budget low, but also utilised a common building material in the region – the builders knew how to make this kind of structure.

Cancún, by contrast, where the imposing research building was erected from glass and steel, is an ‘industrial city full of steelworks’, as Bilbao describes it. Every time, she works with the people, materials and construction methods she finds at the project location. It’s hardly any wonder, then, that Tatiana Bilbao has recently taken on social housing in Mexico – even though she has thus far been known there primarily for her work designing relatively luxurious private homes. In autumn 2015 she presented the prototype for her new project, the ‘8,000 dollar house’ at the first Chicago Architecture Biennial.

With its modular structure and different possible materials, it aims to be as flexible as possible to enable it to be built anywhere in the country. She completed an initial group of 15 houses following this model in Acu?a in 2016 and therefore already has evidence to show how the fundamental considerations for a decidedly simple, affordable home, designed explicitly for the poorest parts of the population in Mexico, can be adapted to the specific physical, climate, political and topographical conditions of a real place. For someone like Tatiana Bilbao, who actually conducts precise research at every site before construction, this idea of a basic model for a house that can be reproduced anywhere should have seemed like an impossibility. The fact that she sets herself such a task just shows that she is still a long way off of finishing her continuous exploration of new approaches and designs.