“MASA: Mexico Architecture Studio Alliance”

This special topics studio based in Mexico City advances architectural thinking through speculative design. The studio allocates time for you to explore your intellectual curiosities in architecture by connecting to courses of action that address complex global challenges facing 21st-century culture that focus on Mexico City, the 5th largest city in the world.

In his 1997 book, “Cities For A Small Planet,” the late British architect Richard Rogers naively described Mexico City as Filthy, Sprawling, and Dangerous. This reprehensible categorization perpetuates urban narratives or pathographies of how architects often understand their position as superior in response to extreme forms of cultural or ideological difference. In contrast to disciplinary thinking that retreats from the mythologies of the urban imaginary by reducing the conceptual scope of architecture, MASA enthusiastically engages the vitality of Mexico City as a means to catalyze architecture that obliterates the parameters of Filthy, Sprawling, Dangerous.

Architecture is the communicative and relational structuring of complexity. Design is the organizational practice that prototypes intricate objects and world-building. Mexico City provides an exuberant platform to expand your design interests - vividly.