Working first together and now separately, Iván Juárez and Patricia Meneses bring two distinct sensibilities to their architecture. Their designs are mainly temporary installations that explore such essential architectural themes as shelter and the relationship of the human body to space and to the landscape. The two settled in Barcelona in 1998 after leaving their native Mexico, and they opened Ex-Studio there in 2002. In 2009, Juárez returned to Mexico to teach and run X-Studio, while Meneses continues to use Barcelona as the base for her own firm Studio Patricia Meneses.

Juárez spent a year painting and making art after finishing his studies. “Upon arriving in Barcelona, this idea arose of finding a point of encounter between art and architecture through space,” he explains. Meanwhile, Meneses “invented” clothes “that were actually pieces of sculpture,” she says. “I’m interested in the dress conceived as a personal architecture that houses us in the most intimate way.” The two began to work without commissions, making spontaneous urban interventions near their studio. Their interest in the intersection of art, body, and space can be seen in their first commissioned projects, both realized for arts festivals. The Dream House in Huesca, Spain, was a fabric cocoon hung from a tree. For the Tambabox in Tambacounda, Senegal, the architects worked with local craftspeople using local materials to create a pavilion covered in traditional fabrics with vivid colors and patterns. Many of the fabric squares have sleeves, so the human figure can occupy and animate the box, converting it into “living architecture.”

Now that the two architects are working independently, their projects underscore their personal voices. Juárez has designed an annex in the courtyard of the Eco Experimental Museum in Mexico City, in the form of a series of sculptural wooden bays that can be rearranged for different activities. Among other projects, Meneses has explored the theme of light-defined space in an exhibit pavilion in which zigzag ­methacrylate walls transmit multicolored light along their exposed edges.