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In 2021, the Mexico City–based architect Isaac Michan received a commission to radically transform a functionalist apartment block in the well-heeled neighborhood of La Condesa. The building had been uninhabited since the 2017 earthquake that severely damaged more than 12,000 structures in the Mexican capital and destroyed 38 others. The five-story building, on a leafy corner in one of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods, showed no external cracks or fissures, but its foundations had settled unevenly after the disaster and its slender columns, designed to diminish in diameter with each successive level, turned out to be insufficient to bear the upper floors’ weight, according to prominent local engineering firm CTC Ingenieros Civiles. And, while the city’s heritage laws did not formally protect the original 1953 building, the client, a developer, had no interest in demolishing it. Michan, a Mexico City native and 2019 Design Vanguard, who opened his firm Michan Architecture immediately after completing his undergraduate architecture degree in 2010, had never worked on such an extensive revamp, but the exercise struck him as interesting. “The site is the project,” he says. “You have to work with what you see and what you find.”

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The original seven-decades-old structure (1), on a corner in La Condesa, has been revamped (2 and top of page) to include expressive wraparound balconies. Photos courtesy Michan Architecture (1), © Arturo Arrieta (2), click to enlarge.

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Michan’s first proposals conserved the look and feel of the facade, with its delicate, shallow balconies and interplay of floor-to-ceiling glazing with broad sweeps of green mosaic, all typical of the period. As iterations progressed, the architect proposed extending the balconies along the length of the elevation and adding a sculptural structure to the roof for an additional apartment. Then, as he and his team stripped away unsalvageable finishes, they discovered deep imprints of wooden formwork in the original columns, slabs, and inverted beams. “The process of designing and discovering the structure was almost simultaneous,” Michan says. Rather than replicating the facade, he would extend the bones outward like an exoskeleton.

As CTC recalibrated the structure—a complex operation that involved weighting the foundations to tilt the building back into equilibrium—Michan settled on a new design that would move the floor-to-ceiling windows deeper into the floor plate and place the concrete columns, which Michan reinforced, outside, on newly expansive wraparound balconies. Built from poured-in-place concrete to match the pattern of the original structure’s formwork, those balconies would cut in at unexpected curves to syncopate the orthogonal rhythm of the raw, expressive facade while opening spaces for planters embedded in the hollows of the inverted beam structure.

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The formwork pattern of the new balconies (3) matches that of the original concrete now exposed within the apartments (4). Photos © Arturo Arrieta

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Michan retained the building’s footprint while dramatically reshaping the layouts of the 1,700-square-foot apartments, one per floor (save the ground floor, used for parking and a small lobby). Originally broken into three bedrooms with enclosed kitchens, bathrooms, and services, the apartments, though generous, “were much more compartmentalized,” Michan says. With the original walls removed, Michan and Alexandra Bové, a partner in the firm focused on interiors, added a sequence of concrete “capsules” to enclose bathrooms, closets, and bedrooms. On the roof, Michan added a penthouse with a smaller footprint and a large, open terrace, incorporating a setback to respect the building’s relationship to the street.

Compared to its lightweight, functionalist predecessor, the overhauled structure seems solid and robust, a sturdy and muscular presence ringed by ficus trees. It draws no attention to its prior incarnation, does not aim to sell itself as a “sustainable” project, even as countless new-builds use superficial green walls as an eco-friendly marketing ploy. Instead, it demonstrates the creative possibilities of working within pre-existing conditions of material and scale.

The building also neatly encapsulates Michan’s own changing interests. Since returning home in 2013 after a masters in architecture at Pratt Institute in New York, his work has gone from a more exuberant experimentation with form, distant from Mexico’s deeply ingrained Modernist tradition, to more visually restrained but technically complex experiments with materiality itself. In a context as rich with craftspeople and artisanal traditions as Mexico, that requires openness to the unexpected, whether in the final tactile surface of a board-formed concrete wall or transformations in a building’s overall design. “I like the idea of letting the project move,” Michan says. “Not compromising but finding the right solution to get you where you want to go.”

Click plan to enlarge