pilares cuauhtémoc

Part of the PILARES (Puntos de Innovación, Libertad, Arte, Educación y Saberes) project —a series of public buildings located in areas mostly affected by poverty and lack of workforce training with strong social, educational and cultural components. The project by the Mexico City Government is composed of 25 educational and training centers or trade schools that double as community centers where sports, recreational activities, urban farming, gastronomy and professional development are accessible to the population.

The "Pilares Cuauhtémoc" is located in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Mexico City. It consists of the retrofitting of a building from the 1950s that used to be a day-care centre or nursery school (Guardería IMSS), composed of 4 volumes that are articulated by a covered exterior circulation. The adaptive reuse project seeks to express its structural essence through a subtle and monochromatic intervention. The neighborhood has high levels of public insecurity and local commerce predominates in the adjacent buildings, which generates an intensified human flow in the area. At the same time, the former nursery is connected to the urban infrastructure and transportation components of the region, having the Lázaro Cárdenas subway station less than 500 meters away.

The project seeks to enrich the city experience with an intervention of an urban-architectural character, generating a visually permeable façade -which invites the local and foreign community to inhabit the space. Through the implementation of a vast school of trades’ program that includes a cyber school, a robotics lab, construction, plumbing, electricity, steel-working, woodworking schools, art and design, textiles, jewelry design, culinary school, among others. The project also offers a public space on the roof of the main building, generating a programmatic extension of an urban plaza, blurring the boundaries between public and private space. The roofs will be used as extensions of the public program, providing accessible and multifunctional spaces for the realization of different urban and social phenomena as well as urban farming to activate the internal economy of the gastronomic program of PILARES.
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In collaboration with Francisco Pardo Arquitecto CDMX / NYC

Location: Colonia Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Mexico

Project Year: 2023
Project Area: 30,000 sq ft 
Status: Under Construction