TC Cuadernos No. 170: Atelier ARS Arquitectura 2010–2025

This 298-page volume brings together fifteen years of work by the Mexican studio ATELIER ARS, founded in Guadalajara by Alejandro Guerrero and Andrea Soto. The publication traces a trajectory deeply linked to landscape, vernacular forms and a contemporary reading of modern tradition, articulating an architectural thought that is built from the territory, light and the experience of the route.

The book presents a selection of works made in different parts of Mexico – Jalisco, Oaxaca or Mexico City – including cultural facilities, funerary spaces, industrial architecture, collective housing, pavilions in natural environments and several projects for a renowned Mexican tequila production firm. Among them are the Center for Culture and the Arts of the 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 housing building in Mexico City or the Rébsamen 19-S Memorial in Coyoacán, among others.

The architecture of ATELIER ARS is recognized for its ability to build places rather than objects: walls that delimit without enclosing them, courtyards that intensify light, ramps and platforms that prolong the topography, and austere materials—mud, stone, brick, concrete—that dialogue with the geology of the site. Many projects function as force fields, where planes, shadows and voids generate spatial sequences that invite a slow, almost ritualistic reading. His work is not ascribed to schools or fashions; it is the result of a critical and sensitive position towards history, vernacular architecture and the ways of inhabiting the Mexican landscape.

The graphic documentation—plans, details, models, photographs, and process narratives—allows us to understand in depth a practice that has contributed to renewing contemporary architecture in Mexico from a precise, silent, and at the same time profoundly poetic look at the landscape.