Design Vanguard 2015

Atelier ARS˚, Guadalajara, Mexico

A legacy of industry and modernism provides a foundation for a firm that is just a decade old.

By Fred A. Bernstein

**Atelier ARS˚**

*Photo © Erick Fernández*

**TID Annex**

The small building at the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiore de Occidente is used by architects and design students for applying paints and varnishes. To provide adequate ventilation, the architects designed it as a large flue. Its steel frame is fitted with oversize doors that are themselves covered in pinewood louvers. With light filtering between the louvers, the low-cost structure looks more like a Japanese teahouse than a shed with utilitarian functions.

*Photo © Onnis Luque*

**Mine the Gap**

When the Chicago Architectural Club solicited ideas for using the vast round hole dug for an unrealized Santiago Calatrava spire, ARSº responded with plans for a columbarium reached by a spiral stairway, which they conceived as a “sacred space for the city.” Its resemblance to the Pantheon is the kind of connection between buildings of different styles and eras that the architects have dubbed “intertectonicity.”

*Photo © Erick Fernández*

**Levering Trade**

In a warehouse for a marketer of electronic devices, the architects referenced 20th-century industrial buildings with sawtooth roofs, in this case emphasizing the “teeth” by exposing steel beams on the articulated front facade (which is made of cement panels and corrugated metal). In a simple yet effective formal move, they reversed the northernmost sawtooth to give symmetry (and thus importance) to the portion of the building containing meeting rooms for employees and clients.

*Photo © Onnis Luque*

**Orange County Memorial**

Avoiding what they see as a trend toward arbitrariness, ARSº prefers to work with architectural elements that it considers elegant and timeless. In this case, for a crime victims’ memorial, those elements are the stela and the burial mound. They arranged 10 stelae (each lined in bronze) on one mound to create a linear void as a shimmering space of remembrance.

*Rendering courtesy Atelier ARSº*

**Orange County Memorial**

*Rendering courtesy Atelier ARSº*

**Novasem Grainery**

Novasem, a company engaged in the production and processing of corn, commissioned this plant on the outskirts of Guadalajara. A pair of granaries in Cor-Ten steel is as monolithic as Richard Serra sculptures, positioned to create a linear space reminiscent of the architects’ Orange County Memorial. Other buildings similarly frame and inflect nature. “A project of industrial architecture can become a landscape project,” says Soto.

*Photo © Onnis Luque*

House and Studio in Mar ChapÃ¡lico — **House and Studio in Mar Chapálico**

The concrete roofs of this 230-square-meter house collect rainwater and send it along the pavement to form a shallow reflecting pool, mimicking the rivulets and ponds of the nearby mountains. The house also references the textile-making tradition of the region, using panels of woven palo dulce wood to control light and privacy.

*Photo © Onnis Luque Meis*

House and Studio in Mar ChapÃÂ¡lico — **House and Studio in Mar Chapálico**

*Photo © Onnis Luque*

**House with Seven Courtyards**

The architects encouraged their clients to save an existing house, making only small modifications to its white stucco walls. Then they added an entry and dining pavilion framed in steel (as if Mies had come for a visit to the countryside), but infilled it with concrete vaults that reinterpret local masonry traditions.

*Photo © Onnis Luque*

courtyard — **House with Seven Courtyards**

*Photo © Onnis Luque*

**Novasem Granary**

*Photo © Onnis Luque*

“The acrobatic novelty of much of today’s architecture doesn’t interest us,” says Alejandro Guerrero. He and Andrea Soto describe themselves as traditionalists, with one caveat: their tradition is modernism. Both graduates of the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiore de Occidente (ITESO), in Guadalajara, Mexico, Guerrero, 38, and Soto, 28, also grew up in that city, surrounded by modernist buildings, including work in the manner of Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Guerrero founded Atelier ARSº in Guadalajara in 2005, around the time he completed an extraordinary house on Lake Santa Maria del Oro, in Nayarit, Mexico, that seems to mimic Mies’s Farnsworth House. The idea behind quoting Mies, Guerrero says, is the same idea Mies had when he borrowed from Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel: “continuity.” Nonetheless, he says the building doesn’t copy the Farnsworth so much as critique it by, for example, using sliding glass doors, so air flows through the building. “Despite their visual similarity, they are quite different,” says Guerrero.

Soto joined as partner in 2010, in time to work on a house in Mar Chapálico that has large expanses of glass covered by panels of woven palo dulce wood. Since then, the designers, who are married, have completed several other houses in which modern structures—made of glass, steel, and concrete—are inflected with vernacular materials and forms. And they have taken the same approach to much larger projects, such as the Levering Trade Headquarters in Zapopan, Mexico, a sawtoothed building that makes industrial architecture beautiful. It’s a trick they also pulled off with a small building at ITESO, with elegant proportions that belie its utilitarian function as a painting shed.

Their breakthrough project may be their corn-processing plant for Novasem, in the desert outside Acatlán de Juárez, Mexico. The plant is composed of a kit of parts that they couldn’t alter much but were able to arrange in ways that shape several acres of the barren site. So interested are the couple in landscape that Soto is pursuing a master’s of landscape architecture at Harvard GSD while Guerrero holds down the fort in Guadalajara. “We began questioning the traditional separation of architecture from urbanism and landscape,” says Soto. “We have become convinced that the approach should be inclusive.”

In addition to more than a dozen completed projects in Mexico, the pair has created thoughtful entries for international competitions. One sought ideas for reusing the giant circular hole dug in Chicago for an unrealized Santiago Calatrava tower; their response was an underground columbarium that, in size and shape, recalls the Pantheon in Rome. It would, Guerrero says, provide “a multisensory experience. You could not only observe the space, you also could feel its coldness because it was underground, and you could smell the vegetation we had chosen.” And they designed a memorial for crime victims in Orange County, California, based on forms they call “timeless and universal.” Their guide was Adolf Loos’s admonition that among architects’ creations, only tombs and monuments are art. But Atelier ARSº’s residential and commercial work seems to disprove that.

Atelier ARS˚

FOUNDED: 2005

DESIGN STAFF: 4

PRINCIPALS: Andrea Soto, Alejandro Guerrero

EDUCATION: Soto: Harvard GSD, MLA candidate 2017; ITESO, B.A., 2011; Guerrero: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, M.Arch., 2006; ITESO, B.A., 2000

KEY COMPLETED PROJECTS: TID Annex, ITESO University, Guadalajara. 2015; Levering Trade Headquarters, Zapopan, 2014; House and Studio in Mar Chapálico, Ajijíc, 2014; House with 7 Courtyards, Zapopan, 2011; SMO House, Santa María del Oro Nayarít, 2005 (all in Mexico)

Key Current PROJECTS: Café Marina, Puerto Vallarta, 2015; Cultural Promotion Center, ITESO, Guadalajara, 2016; Atalaya House, Zapopan, 2016; Novasem Headquarters, Acatlán de Juárez, 2017 (all in Mexico)

www.atelierars.com