Arquitecturas del Fuego Exhibition

Guadalajara, Jalisco, México. 2021.

Exhibited in Artlecta, from February to May 2021.

The exhibition “Arquitecturas del Fuego”, within the Artlecta exhibition space, portrays the interests and most recent architectural production of ATELIER ARS. Their professional practice, and the historical reflection of Alejandro Guerrero and Andrea Soto who lead the firm, have been developed in dialogue with certain themes or areas that are repeated, intertwined with each other, resignifying themselves, and evolving over time: tradition, order, monumentality, industrial architecture, the relationship with the landscape, crafts and rituals. It is not possible to separate the thinking process from the work, since both imply ordering ideas, themes, references, realms of reality. The exhibition that accompanies the book Arquitecturas del Fuego I y II, shows that it is inevitable that one ends up being impregnated in the other, giving it shape; gives fundamental clues about this universe of meaning and references and the way in which they resignify themselves when they meet each other, when they come into play in different ways. A few years ago, Alejandro and Andrea proposed binomials between nature and construction, -between landscape and architecture- whose clearest example is the Novasem project. In recent years the boundary between the two disciplines has become ambiguous and the relationship between one and the other has become more intense. On the one hand, the outline of their architecture is more organic, contrasting with their first more rigorous projects; on the other, the landscape has been acquiring a more leading role.

Arquitecturas del Fuego I  is a historical journey from Vitruvius to Peter Zumthor, which, far from becoming a catalog of references, persues the place that corresponds to the architect of our time. Arquitecturas del Fuego II deals with Nordic architecture and its relationship with the landscape, or perhaps it would be better to say: its being landscape. Kengo Kuma wrote that our time is the time of the gardens. In the book, as in his work, the fields of history, landscape, rituals and monumentality are intertwined; It could be said that although ATELIER ARS’s searches are no longer born from the rigorous order of its first stage, this does not mean a renunciation of the importance of history, but rather it has been the result of a reflective process to find, from the themes and own references, the complexities and particular nuances of our time and our territory; and thus, in this process, stand themselves in the place that belongs to them within the course of history. They have been finding it, with justice, in a new pact with the landscape.

The publication of Arquitecturas del Fuego arises from the collaboration between two projects that share the city of Guadalajara as headquarters; on one hand Artlecta and on the other Galimatías. This publication represents the link that is beginning to be built between projects of different kinds, directed by people of different generations, but with a common ideal: the construction of a community of reflective, critical and dialogue-minded architects, which is, a living community. In addition to the texts by Alejandro Guerrero, there is a foreword by Diego Calderón (DF_DC) and 49 illustrations by Bernardo Orduño that accompany the reading of the book. We intend this project to be the first of many collaborations, among so many characters and projects that have as their ultimate goal the construction of a richer, fairer and more beautiful city.

–Diego Orduño-