Iñaqui Ponce: This Mestiza Architecture project is a declaration of love for our land, our sun, and our way of experiencing space. From the heart of Tlaquepaque, Jalisco, this project draws on the deep roots of Mexico—its raw materials, its incandescent light, its playful spirit—and transforms them into a contemporary architecture that breathes with pride.
Here, exposed concrete, lime plaster, baked clay, and wood are not simple materials: they are the skin and bones of an architecture that never forgets where it comes from. Every wall, every patio, every shadow cast on the burning ground carries within it the memory of generations who knew how to build with the earth and under the open sky.
The vibrant red of the ironwork, inspired by the work of Juan O'Gorman, is not an ornament: it is a cry of identity. A decisive line that draws windows and doors that open like a fan, like someone caressing the air, enveloping the sober volumes in a life-filled embrace and opening to the outside without any restrictions. The native vegetation—explosive bougainvillea, majestic cacti, guanacaste trees that protect from the sun, orange trees that perfume the air—doesn't adorn, but inhabits. They are living beings that participate in the space, generating cool patios, shaded corridors, green horizons that blend with the ochre of the walls and the deep blue of the Jalisco sky.
The light, omnipresent and generous, filters through patios that function as climatic lungs and spaces for coexistence; and through openings in the slabs, leaving in its wake shadow patterns that move like silent dances across the surfaces. The paths are not straight lines: they are unique paths, invitations to get lost, to pause under a tree, to follow the route marked by a shadow or the scent of a flower.
Mestizo Architecture is a living manifesto: a generous architecture that understands that inhabiting is not just occupying a space, but experiencing it. It is a song to the earth, to dust, to green, to the play of light, to heritage and to freedom.
