Design School in Mexico City

In this studio, we imagined an addition to the main building of IMSS, the social security bureau of Mexico, located in Mexico City. The addition was to be a design school that interfaced with the IMSS office without major alterations of the original structure. During our class trip, we observed that Mexico City was built in layers, upon itself, with new buildings and materials interfacing directly with those that came before. We read the city as a palimpsest, incorporating the new upon the old. We took some photos where we could observe this phenomenon in the city. Our proposal for the design school continued this reading: We imagined blocks of different programs stacking upon each other and the IMSS building.

In our early massing model, we took formal cues from Mexican architects like Luis Barrágan and Tatiana Bilbao. In later iterations of the design, seen on the following pages, we continued the organizational strategy of stacking different programs in blocks, but continued in a less referential formal direction. The final proposal maintains a similar massing to the earlier proposal, but with a larger public plaza at street level and mesh facade that drapes over the forms, in a way, another layer of the city.

Spring 2025, Faculty: Zeina Koritem, Partner: John Northrup