To be a thirty-something architect in New York City is generally to spend years tinkering on projects won by older, more established architects. But in Mexico City, it’s different: Chaotic zoning laws, cheap labor and insatiable housing needs have created the perfect incubator for young design talent. In addition, the Wild West environment has fostered a peculiar real estate phenom: market urbanism, where the architect and the developer are the same entity.
As a result, Mexico City’s young architects are getting noticed — and recruited for work farther afield. The most famous is probably Enrique Norten, who is working on the Rutgers campus and apartments in Long Island City, and was a National Design Awards finalist for the luxury One York condos in downtown Manhattan. Others are gaining notoriety as well, and Mexico City’s reputation as a cradle of modern design
talent is flourishing.
Javier Sanchez, a 38-year-old architect, has been able to build up an impressive body of work under these conditions. His company, Higuera + Sanchez, is headed by five partners who hold degrees in architecture, engineering, actuary studies, sales and finance. The firm scouts out and buys land and then decides what kind of structure would best suit it. Sanchez, a partner, then heads the design process while others figure out how to market the building once it’s complete. After the project is done, the firm sells it.
In addition to buildings in Mexico City, Higuera + Sanchez recently took on projects in Panama and Costa Rica.
“We are able in Mexico to do everything involved in the real estate process from one office. That allows us complete control over what we are designing. We are our own clients sometimes. In the end, you have architecture that’s about architecture,” said Sanchez.
Home to 18 million people, Mexico City is a kaleidoscope of building styles, and the demand for new housing is enormous. The city is under constant threat from earthquakes that remind chilangos, as Mexico City residents call themselves, that the built environment can change at any moment.
Nonetheless, each year in Mexico City, about 100,000 units get built, in comparison to about 60,000 units in the New York metro area. While only a small percentage of the new Mexico City homes are built by the so-called market urbanists, their work is changing the look of the city. Long-established middle- and upper-class areas, like Condesa, Polanco and Roma, are now dotted with modernist apartment and office buildings.
Young architects can experiment with unconventional building styles “because they have a capacity to be absorbed in such a huge market,” said Jose Castillo, a Mexico City-based architect and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Architects in Mexico are more bold in looking for changes in zoning,” Castillo said. “And Mexico City is a place where labor is very cheap, which allows for other types of speculation that would be impossible in New York.”
Strikingly, the education of some of the cities’ top talent is the same. Many of Mexico City’s most successful architects hold graduate degrees from Columbia, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. Still, few Mexican architects have been able to break into the U.S. market, in part because of stringent rules governing accreditation.
Norten’s achievements in New York, Miami and Los Angeles prove this barrier can be broken. After earning his master’s degree from Cornell in 1981, Norten returned to Mexico.
His firm, TEN Arquitectos, opened a New York office in 2003. Now, the firm is finishing up One York, a building that has already sold a 3-bedroom duplex for $20 million. In addition, TEN Arquitectos has been chosen to design a wing of the Brooklyn Library, although that project is currently stalled.
In 2005, the Center for Architecture in Manhattan hosted an exhibit called Mexico City Dialogues. Rick Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, helped organize the show and said, “We were seeing so many spectacular works of architecture by relatively young people in their early 30s and late 20s — people who had broken through and were able to do significant projects, which very, very rarely happens in New York.”