Architect Tatiana Bilbao: Exhibition in Vienna – Culture

Who would like to plan a ruin? Where plants have long since conquered their terrain before the first person has even entered the building and where the water will flood parts of the area when the sea level rises again? Tatiana Bilbao obviously. The design by the Mexican architect for the new aquarium and marine research center in Mazatlán, a city directly on the Pacific, looks like a mysterious Inca complex. The reddish, strictly geometric walls are overgrown by the green of the plants, ivy, bushes and trees, and in places the water enters the terraced landscape. It is not clear where exactly the border runs between inside and outside, between nature and man-made. It shouldn’t be either.

This is one of the reasons why the architect is for Angelika Fitz, the director of the Architecture Center Vienna (Az W), representative of a “young new generation”: “Bilbao stands for a new attitude in architecture”, says Fitz, who, together with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, the Mexican architect and her office Tatiana Bilbao Estudio in the Az W organized the first major solo exhibition in Europe. Tatiana Bilbao is doing this because she answers the question of coexistence on this planet differently than architecture generally did in the past century.

On the one hand, there is the claim of the 49-year-old architect, which is also expressed in the aquarium: Bilbao wants to move away from the view of the Anthropocene, where people think they can dominate and influence everything, towards a planetary, more holistic approach, wherever Instead, an attempt is made to take account of the needs of nature as well as those of humans. Which is why Tatiana Bilbao mainly worked with environmental researchers to design the aquarium. The result was something like an artificial reef in the water that works with the tides instead of against them. If the world wants to have a future, in times of climate catastrophe and a construction industry that is considered to be the number 1 contributor, then such a holistic approach is likely to be the only justifiable type in architecture.

Open detailed view

On the other hand, there is Tatiana Bilbao’s different way of workingWhat the Viennese exhibition shows very vividly: Instead of computer renderings, there are mainly colorful collages and pop-up models that make even children understand what it is about. Take the house for single parents, for example, where the three-dimensional paper model looks like a cheerful type case of life and above all tries to depict the diversity of different family and work forms in the building. For the botanical garden in Culiacan, for which Bilbao has been designing buildings, facilities and pavilions since 2004, the architect put together the site plan from various dried leaves. And in a project that came about as a reaction to the devastating earthquake in Mexico in 2017, the architect, together with local initiatives, involved children so that they can experience the misfortune in art workshops, but also the wishes that arose afterwards in pictures and Drawings were recorded, which in turn flowed into Bilbao’s draft for a community site in one of the affected communities and which are now also exhibited in Vienna.

Open detailed view

Children’s drawings, site plans made of dried leaves, comic-like sketches – Tatiana Bilbao’s way of working is very far from that of an omniscient god of architects a la Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed entire cities with the stroke of a pen and pretended to know what for all residents at all times is good at it. It goes with the fact that the Mexican architect prefers to work with others than to compete with them. This is shown, for example, in her master plan for a Mexican pilgrimage. Bilbao invited eight international architecture firms to develop something on the 117-kilometer stretch between Ameca and Tlapa de Allende, which is visited by around three million pilgrims every year, Alejandro Aravena and Ai Weiwei, for example, each designed a lookout point, and Luis Aldrete designed a pilgrimage shelter.

Open detailed view

And finally there is Tatiana Bilbao’s interest in living. The question of how people can live together and what generates community in the process obviously drives them. That should also have something to do with her professional past, because before she opened her own office in 2004 Tatiana Bilbao Estudio with around 60 employees today, she worked as a consultant for the Ministry of Housing in Mexico City. You have to know that in Mexico the right to housing is enshrined in the constitution, which is why every government has the mandate to provide each of its citizens with dignified and adequate living space. But what sounds good also creates problems. Because even more than in Germany, social housing there is constrained to a rigid concept of rules and regulations. The “provision of a living box”, so Bilbao in the catalog, is “not synonymous with the provision of a house in which a decent life is possible”. Nowhere, but especially not in a country where 60 different languages ​​are spoken, which is a first indication of how many different ideas about family, property and ways of life prevail there. Bilbao’s architecture therefore tries to make rooms as open as possible so that the future residents can use them as they see fit.

Open detailed view

It is astonishing how beautifully the architect succeeds in building social housing, where the budget is usually tiny. In the catalog she declares her houses for the wealthy to be basic research for them. Designing beautiful houses with a lot of money is very easy, but: “How can you achieve the same effect if you don’t have a lot of money?” What materials they use and what proportions they choose, or how to place things and move through rooms, they learn all of this in their high-priced single-family houses and then implement it in social housing. Bilbao’s credo implies that beauty belongs to everyone and recalls the demand for luxury for everyone this year Pritzker Prize winners Jean-Philippe Vassal and Anne Lacaton.

One would like to see this sincere interest in state housing construction from architects who build villas and penthouse houses in this country.

Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, Architekturzentrum Wien. Until February 7, 2022. The English-language catalog has been published by Lars Müller Publishers and costs 45 euros.