Tatiana Bilbao: The Mediator Architect
The Sea of Cortés Research Center, in Mazatlán, Mexico, Tatiana Bilbao Studio, 2023
When I met Tatiana Bilbao via Zoom at midday on a Sunday, she was on an intense professional European tour, having already passed through Madrid and been in Poland. When we connected, she was in Vienna and would leave the next day for Berlin. We met through the computer screen; I was in New York, and she was in a room of the monastery of the medieval Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz. The current monks decided to open a branch of this monastery in Brandenburg, Germany. Bilbao has been working with them for six years, and the following day she would present the church’s design to Father Abbot. It was a significant milestone in the project’s timeline.
Tatiana Bilbao, an accomplished Mexican architect born in 1972 and living in Mexico City, generously accommodated our meeting despite going through a busy time, insisting that it was not a problem for her, revealing a polite and humble character. She was using a background filter that blurred everything behind her, obscuring her surroundings. I could only see her face. She was soft-spoken, rhythmically rearranged her honey hair away from her face, and kept a friendly smile throughout our exchange. The blurred background tapped into my imagination and suggested a dim ambient light and a presumably expansive medieval stone room.
Tatiana Bilbao is a humanist focusing her architecture on sustainable design and social housing. Of her professional practice, she stated: “architecture has become an impediment and a restriction between humans and their environment, and I believe that [architecture] should be a mediator.” She suggested that her function is to help settle agreements between conflicting parties. In her case, that involves the body, people, customs, desires, physical surroundings, history, the law, and so on.
Bilbao speaks from the perspective of almost 20 years of professional practice. She comes from a family of educators, descendants of refugees from the Spanish Civil War on her father's side, and German immigrants on her mother's side. She studied architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana de Mexico. Since 1998, she has had a distinguished career first in Mexico and then in the international arena. In 2004 she founded her own architectural firm with projects in Mexico, China, and Europe. Today the areas of operations of Tatiana Bilbao Estudio are even more expansive and employ a staff of around forty people. She has taught at Universidad Iberoamericana, Yale University School of Architecture, Harvard University GSD, and Peter Behrens School of Arts at HS Dusseldorf in Germany, among others.
Since 2007 she has amassed an impressive number of accolades.[1] This year alone, she was recognized with the Richard Neutra Award and the AW Architect of the Year 2022. All these accomplishments contrast with her modest and pleasant demeanor. Those character traits presumably stem from her family education, the purposeful view she sets for herself in her practice, and the close contact with poverty and human suffering that some people in positions of privilege develop in proximity to the realities of the global south. Mexico has a population of 120 million, one of Latin America's fastest demographic growth rates, and a housing deficit of 9 million homes. For that reason, a critical focus of her work has been developing projects driven by a minimal economy for low-income housing in Mexico.
Bilbao gained international notoriety in 2007 when Chinese artist Ai Weiwei selected her among a group of sixteen young architects to develop a network of pavilions in the Jinhua Architecture Park on the banks of the Yiwa river in Shanghai. She completed one of the most notable projects, however, with the passing of time, she became critical of this work, asserting: “[now] I would have done something else, without this idea of prominence…but hey, it's part of learning.”
Today to fulfill Bilbao's purpose of being a mediator, she has developed a capacity for an integrative radial view of the coordinates at stake. Projects are created in close collaboration with clients, users, and teammates. She does not believe in architecture that comes from a single creator. She says, "architecture today should not be the architecture of the architect, but of a much more diverse group of people; it is definitely an interdisciplinary work." She also believes that "architecture is a human space and, as such, its evolution does not stop." Furthermore, the creative process in Bilbao never begins with a finished computer rendering of the proposal. It starts with an understanding through a sentence or idea that explains the physical, social, political, and economic context. Fundamental to this working method is the use of “hand drawing and iterative models to keep design and development rooted in spatial and not digital exploration.” The use of collage is a critical method in her process. The technique is collaborative, worked on by several people, and flexible, leaving some details open to interpretation.
The Sea of Cortés Research Center, in Mazatlán, Mexico, today under construction, is a project the Tatiana Bilbao Estudio has been working on for several years. The process of its becoming offers a compelling insight into Bilbao's singular way of working. At first, Bilbao was offered a commission to work on Mazatlán Central Park, part of the premises of the Sea of Cortés Research Center. However, Bilbao did not accept it until the client agreed to her conditions: to consolidate the park with the adjacent natural lagoon, which regulates the entire biological system of the city of Mazatlán.
At that time, the research center had already commissioned a museum and an aquarium to two architecture offices. Meanwhile, Bilbao analyzed the aquarium project presented by an architectural office from San Francisco and, when asked, expressed a differing point of view to the client. She thought the program was strange since the aquarium consisted of a transparent geodesic structure which, among other species, penguins and turtles were going to inhabit. Her point of view intrigued the client, and shortly after, the client decided to transfer the entire commission for the research center, including the museum and aquarium, to Bilbao's office. However, unsure of taking on the full task, Bilbao expressed once more all her additional reservations. First, she had to reconsider what an aquarium should be. She thought the previous project was devised from a perspective of what she calls "the man controlling the universe," where the species are presented as a fantasy world, as entertainment. She also resisted the idea of locating penguins in an environment of 104 degrees Fahrenheit when at a short distance, they have "the most important natural aquarium in the world, which is the Sea of Cortés." These arguments prompted the client to unite forces and align with her vision. With all parties in agreement to follow Tatiana Bilbao’s lead, the design of the entire research center began. For scientific matters, Bilbao selected a team from the Vancouver Aquarium who had previously done much research in the Sea of Cortés. For the development of the architecture, the office started with a single idea: to “fill the building with water and thus it would be filled with life,” and developed the project based on the following fictional narrative:
“We arrived in the year 2300 to open roads in a space that had been a building in 2020, which had been flooded in 2100 because the sea had reached the top. In 2200 the water had given way, and different species of nature had invaded it, both marine and terrestrial, flora and fauna. So, we opened channels for this building … built in 2020 to discover how nature had taken it over. This is [the way] we composed this building.”
The office generated a semi-permeable structure in three levels. It consists of a series of functional open-air walls integrated into its natural surroundings, erected on an orthogonal grid formation creating outdoor and indoor spaces, enclosures, and installations. The structure promotes the accommodation of local endemic flora, fauna, and ponds with marine species from the Sea of Cortés. The plants will grow naturally, colonizing the structural wall grid conceived for such a purpose.
Concerning nature, Bilbao asserts, “for me, it is very important because I believe that we come from nature and architecture emerges from [it and] it should be embedded [and] it is essential that architecture be a mediator between the environment and our body.” About her nature of being a woman, she alludes to her role as a mother. She has two daughters and three stepchildren with her current husband. She thinks being a mother gives her a different perspective on her work. Interestingly, in the female body, she sees the primary architecture, which, as she says, “like architecture, [the female body] is made to protect the body so it can exist.
Footnotes:
[1] In 2007, she was awarded the Architecture Record’s Design Vanguard for being one of the 10 best emerging firms, in 2009 was named an Emerging Voice by the Architecture League of the city of New York, in 2012 was recognized with the Kunstpreis Berlin, in 2014 she got the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture Prize by the LOCUS Foundation, the Impact Award 2017 Honorees for Architzier A + Awards, the Marcus Prize Award 2019, and the Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal of 2020. She was recognized as Honorary Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) in 2021.
