Famous Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide asked Taller de Arquitectura Mauricio Rocha + Gabriela Carrillo to create a studio a few steps from her home in Barrio del Niño Jesús, Mexico City. The project is all in the family, in fact, Mauricio Rocha is Iturbide and architect Manuel Rocha Diaz’s son, who together with Gabriela Carrillo founded Taller de Arquitectura. The team’s philosophy is:
“To translate the traditions and materials of the places in which we operate in a contemporary way, not through fashionable forms or fireworks, but with silence, space, the experience of emptiness”.
The architecture, according to the duo, must give an answer in relation to the “place in which we live and our economic and social situations“: this approach is particularly evident in the studio created for Iturbide. The building is spread over three floors, characterized by the material of red bricks, able to give warmth and familiarity to the surrounding space, without ever making those inside it feel oppressed thanks to the holes on the bricks. The mosaic floors and the interlocking walls give a great harmony to the structure, which is not heavy in form, while the final touch is given by the plants, the large windows, and the two semi-enclosed courtyards.