Arquitecturas del Fuego I & II. Book 2021. 

Alejandro Guerrero recently published “Arquitecturas del Fuego I & II” in collaboration with Artlecta bookstore and Galimatías collective, both projects located in Guadalajara. The book gives an account of Alejandro’s architectural thinking, his reflections and the structure he shared as a teacher at ITESO University. The book also has 49 illustrations by Bernardo Orduño and a foreword by Diego Calderón. When reading it, it becomes clear that it is not possible to separate the thought from the work, since both involve ordering ideas, references and moments. In this case, the recurring themes are the relationship between architecture and landscape, the role of history, matter and architectural elements. Despite being a book to be read by itself, we cannot deny that it provides keys to understand the work of Atelier ARS, its universe of meaning and references. Alejandro’s practice (which he shares with Andrea Soto); proposed a binomial language between nature and buildings a few years ago with their project Novasem. Now, in the most recent projects, the limit has become more ambiguous. On the one hand, the language is more organic when it comes to projecting formal systems (in contrast to the first projects, which had a more rigorous order); and, on the other hand, the landscape plays a more leading role in the project, being conceived from a language of typologies (again the role of history).