Tatiana Bilbao: “Architecture should care about collectivity”.
Tatiana Bilbao, Tatiana Bilbao, nominee arcVision Prize 2015, interviewed by Domus in her office with sequences from Mexico City.
During the new video, from the Time-Space-Existence series produced by PLANE–SITE on show during Venice Architecture Biennale 2018, the Mexican architect analyzes the role of architecture and explains her approach, where a new project is not about “the form or the shape of a building, but is about what it does to people.”
Tatiana Bilbao discusses her design philosophy, the role of the architect in society and how a building can enhance human life. She also points out the necessity for intricate hand-work and locally sourced materials, keeping in mind the needs of construction workers and maintenance workers.
The video has been commissioned by the GAA Foundation and funded by the ECC (European Cultural Center) and will be featured within the “Time-Space-Existence” exhibition at the next Architecture Biennale in Venice.
Tatiana Bilbao
« We do architecture to raise the human quality of life.
We work with our environment, our surrounding materials, hand labor and techniques, opening channels of communication between the various social sectors, and develop productive activities that enable different aesthetic experiences with strong ideas and direct definitions and intentions. We try to understand, though our multicultural and multidisciplinary office, our world, and to translate its rigid codes into architecture.
Through these strands, the office regenerates spaces “humanized” to be aware and react to global capitalism, opening up niches for cultural and economic development, creating a climate of collaboration where there are various disciplinary resonances in technical areas; theoretical and artistic works which, in one way or another affect the patterns and structures of society.
The office associates work to the theme of resonance, which matches the frequency of a given system with the frequency of an external drive, with certain information generated by another system.
As with the ethics of otherness of Levinas, the office incorporates the other, which has not been recognized or accepted by the intellectual, political, or business oligarchy, but that is on the lookout for a qualitative change in structural life. To this end we are building with the responsibility of understanding all that we do and we mean to do, learning though it and working with it. » www.tatianabilbao.com
Biography
1972 – Mexico City, Mexico
Tatiana Bilbao, nominee arcVision Prize 2015, studied Architecture and Urbanism at Universidad Iberoamericana in 1996, where she obtained her degree with honors. She has developed projects of architecture and urbanism in diverse fields, both public and private.
She worked as an advisor for Urban Projects at the Urban Housing and Development Department of Mexico City and in 1999 she joined and co-founded LCM S.C. In 2004 she founded Tatiana Bilbao S.C. with projects in China, Europe and Mexico. Tatiana was awarded with the Design Vanguard as one of the Top 10 emerging firms of the year in 2007 by Architecture Record and named as Emerging Voice by the Architecture League of New York in 2009.
In December 2010, three projects were acquired by the George Pompidou Centre in Paris, France, to be part of their Architectural Permanent Collection. She has been visiting professor at Andres Bello University in Santiago de Chile, at Peter Behrens School of Architecture, Düsseldorf, Germany. Starting in Spring 2015, she is going to be Louis I. Kahn visiting assistant professor at Yale. Her work has been published, among others, in A+U, Plot, GA Houses, Domus and The New York Times.