Articles by Mónica Arellano

Stairways are central to access and mobility within a space, and yet, they often take a backseat to other elements of design within a work of architecture. However, Mexican firm PRODUCTORA has put them at the forefront of many of their projects, notably the Teopanzolco Cultural Center.

In Mexico, self-construction has been a topic heated debate between its advocates and opponents; however, this doesn’t diminish its prevalence throughout Mexico and the world. Over the past few years, initiatives on the part of architects have driven the creation of instruction manuals for do-it-yourself builders as a way to promote health and safety in self-construction and to also provide insight into building materials and techniques. In many ways, the initiative has improved the self-construction process, a fact evident in the increasingly visible creations seen throughout Mexico.

Photographer Iwan Baan captured the construction process of the social housing Las Américas in León, imagined by the New York-based office, SO-IL who collaborated with the Municipal Housing Institute of León (IMUVI) in the design of the development.

Taller de Arquitectura Carmelina&Aurelio, by Tuxtla Gutiérrez in Mexico, has launched a coloring book with illustrations of famous architectural works. Due to the success of the first edition, the studio has just published the second volume of the series, with illustrations of works by Zaha Hadid, Kengo Kuma, Rozana Montiel, BIG, and Eileen Gray. The digital book in PDF format is available for free on the studio website.

Arizona is located in the western region of the United States. It has geographical borders with Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, in the United States, as well as with Sonora in Mexico. The state is also situated on the Sierra Madre Occidental and is home to a segment of the Colorado River, as well as the Grand Canyon. Part of Aridoamerica, Arizona’s landscape is composed, in its majority, of Cactaceae and desert species.

Located in the southern region of the United States, the state of Florida is one of the most populous states and the 22nd largest. The state hosts some of the most populated areas in the country, such as Jacksonville and the Miami Metropolitan Area.

Carmelina&Aurelio Architecture Studio based in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas in Mexico, released a book with architectural illustrations to color. The book in PDF format is available on their website for free and consists of eight letter-size pages. Read on for the featured projects as well as examples of color palettes for further inspiration.

Floor Plan Croissant is a project directed by Boryana Ilieva founded to examine cinematographic spaces and bring the spatial language of the director to her own architectural understanding. However, later these translations took a social turn: as an architect and cinema lover, Boryana perceives a general gap between cinema and architecture, or in other words, a space that allows architects to explore beyond the screen. With this in mind, her work is based on extracting the plans from the main protagonist places in outstanding films, since she believes that a movie theater plan forms a phantom matrix around which the directors not only construct arguments, but rather they also place hidden messages.

Text by Mónica Arellano.

One of the most important cities in the world –and the most populated in the United States of America–, New York is home to a great mix of cultures and history that has been shaped over the years, while art and architecture play a fundamental role in this development.