Gabriela Carrillo

Mexican architect Gabriela Carrillo has built an exemplary career and is passionate about the city, territory, and diversity. Her widely awarded works, first in partnership with Mauricio Rocha and now running her own studio, have become the reference image when discussing contemporary architecture in Mexico. Her projects translate the world's needs, developing constant work to recognize the values of the territory in order to provide spaces that dignify its inhabitants. Situated between praxis, theory, and research, her interests are focused on the everyday, leading a flexible and dynamic practice that allows her to maintain a balance between working and living.

Since her early years as a student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Gabriela Carrillo has been interested and passionate about the city, territory, and diversity. After obtaining her degree in Architecture with honors, she continued in academia, research, and training of new generations being an academic at the Faculty of Architecture of the UNAM since 2003 and Head of the Research and Degree Seminar Estudio RX with Loreta Castro since 2018. She has taught at Harvard GSD, the University of New Mexico, and the WAVE program in Venice, Italy.

As a former partner of the award-winning Mexican firm Taller de Arquitectura Mauricio Rocha + Gabriela Carrillo, she has developed both private and internationally recognized public works including the Oral-Penal Courts in Patzcuaro, a building that proposes a renewed scheme to address changes in the implementation of Mexican justice, and the Los Chocolates Community Development Centre, a project that responds to the needs and opportunities offered by the old La Carolina neighborhood in the center of Cuernavaca. In the end, projects that are interested in the purpose of architecture, experience, and dialogue.

Today, she has her own practice in Taller Gabriela Carrillo, where she considers that "observation and the maximum recognition and respect for the territory are the main strategies to realize architectural proposals, of different scales, which at the same time seek provocation and spatial delight". She is also co-founder of the Colectivo c733, aiming at the development of public projects and from where she realized works such as the Public Market in Matamoros, the Casa de Música in Nacajuca and the Tapachula Station in Chiapas. Three projects that strongly believe in the collective value and the power of spatial dignity.

Her work develops between practice, theory and research as well as between the local and the global, translating the needs of the world into diverse and inclusive architecture. In this vein, she leads a flexible and dynamic practice that has allowed her to incorporate motherhood and personal life, maintaining a balance between working and living. "Doing architecture does not necessarily mean building walls," says Gabriela Carillo. Empathy is present in her discourse, especially around the dignity of people.

She has been recognized with several national and international awards such as the Emerging Voices Awards in 2014, the Women in Architecture Award from Architectural Review in 2017, and the Medaille d'Or from the French Academy of Architecture in 2019. Her projects have been exhibited at various international exhibitions and biennials, her work Casa de Música being recently presented at the 12th Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism 2022 where she received the Award for Built Works. Her work and research have been widely published in various national and international media such as Domus Italia, Casabella, Arquitectura Viva, Wallpaper and Architectural Review, and ArchDaily, among others.

Text: Fabian Dejtiar
Photography: Boris Noir