“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.
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