“In Mexico, you don’t need anything to practice—a lawyer could do architecture,” says Juan Alfonso Garduño Jardón, “which is not great, but good for young architects.” So good that he, his sister Maria de los Ángeles Garduño, and classmate Armando González, established their own firm in 1997, before any of them had even received degrees in architecture. For Garduño Jardón, a parallel career in academia also began around this time, when the dean of their college asked him to substitute for a professor who couldn’t make it to class.
As a young man teaching and practicing, Garduño Jardón, now 45, became increasingly disillusioned by the work his firm was pursuing. “We were very ambitious,” he recalls, “but we weren’t earning money.” An experience with a housing project in 2003 left him particularly jaded. “The developer totally ripped us off,” says Garduño Jardón. That signaled a turning point for the architect, who applied to the Urban Design program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Given his experiences at the time, Garduño Jardón decided against another architecture degree because “I wanted to learn how I could use the city to benefit myself—just like any developer.” When he graduated from the GSD in 2007, however, his approach to urbanism had shifted: “The responsibility that citizens, architects, and developers have to contribute to a better city became a lot clearer,” he says.
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