Isaac Michan is fascinated by the uncanny, by that fine line between the overly familiar and the eerily unrecognizable. The 34-year-old founder of Michan Architecture—a Mexico City–based studio launched in 2010—creates structures that “propose a new reality for that place,” he says, “but not something completely new from zero.”
Attempting to describe this professional preoccupation in more tangible terms, Michan aptly brings up masonry—particularly the red-mud artisanal bricks incorporated into his design for Z53 Social Housing, a project completed in 2012 that consists of 42 units spread across three towers. “That whole area of the city is built with brick walls,” he explains, “but in an extremely standardized way, because everything needs to be cheap.” Michan upends expectations by carefully arranging the bricks so that they actively respond to light and shadow. They may even appear to be undulating as you waltz past the building. You see? Uncanny.
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