TC CUADERNOS 170: Atelier ARS

Architecture and Landscape 2010-2025

This 298-page volume showcases fifteen years of work by ATELIER ARS, a Mexican studio founded in Guadalajara by Alejandro Guerrero and Andrea Soto. The publication traces the studio’s trajectory, which is deeply linked to landscape, vernacular forms, and a contemporary interpretation of modern tradition. It articulates an architectural philosophy constructed from territory, light, and the experience of travel.

The book showcases projects completed in various regions of Mexico, including Jalisco, Oaxaca, and Mexico City. These projects encompass cultural facilities, funeral spaces, industrial architecture, collective housing, pavilions in natural environments, and several initiatives for the Clase Azul brand. These include the Centre for Culture and the Arts of La Ribera in Ajijic, the Novasem complexes in Acatlán de Juárez, the pavilions in the Huentitán Natural Park in Guadalajara, El Arca in Puerto Escondido, the Welt residential building in Mexico City and the Rébsamen 19-S Memorial in Coyoacán.

ATELIER ARS’s architecture is recognised for its ability to create spaces rather than objects: walls that define without closing off, courtyards that intensify light, ramps and platforms that extend the topography, and austere materials such as clay, stone, brick and concrete that interact with the site’s geology. Many of their projects function as force fields where planes, shadows and voids generate spatial sequences that encourage a slow, almost ritualistic exploration. The studio’s work does not adhere to schools or fashions; it is the result of a critical and sensitive approach to history, vernacular architecture and the ways in which the Mexican landscape is inhabited.

The graphic documentation — plans, details, models, photographs, and process narratives — provides an in-depth understanding of a practice that has contributed to the renewal of contemporary Mexican architecture from a precise, silent, and deeply poetic view of the landscape.