In the 13 years since she established her studio in Mexico City, the architect Tatiana Bilbao has designed a body of work that is refreshingly dogma-free; she has never had a signature style. Instead, Bilbao’s varied projects in her native country—including an art-filled botanical garden; the master plan and open-air chapel for a pilgrimage route in the Jalisco Mountains; a research building that is a stack of glass boxes; and sustainable affordable housing—demonstrate an abiding interest in how people really use architecture. “Every building is different for us,” Bilbao says. “We try to think on a human scale.”
A case in point is a vacation house that Bilbao designed for a wooded site on a mountainside overlooking the city of Monterrey. The client, who lives in Mexico City, is the daughter of a couple who purchased the large tract and divided it into 60 lots for their heirs, who can build houses there on the condition that they hire architects to design them. So far, the roster includes Tadao Ando, the late Ricardo Legorreta, and contemporary Mexican architects like Alberto Kalach and Bernardo Gómez-Pimienta, as well as Bilbao herself, who had already designed a house—Casa Ventura, a series of pentagonal forms stepping down the hillside—nearby.
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