Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman and Ricardo Roxo Matias of APRDELESP

APRDELESP is a Mexico City-based studio founded in 2012. Led by partners Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman, Ricardo Roxo Matias, and Guillermo González Ceballos, the office focuses on “practice-as-research on space and its appropriation.” By envisioning its own office and projects as public sites of spatial research and experimentation, APRDELESP aims to welcome unexpected encounters and discussions through the creation of self-managed “subspaces” such as cafes, galleries, print shops, furniture stores, and event spaces.

Recent projects include:

• Material Art Fair, an annual contemporary art fair in Mexico City for which the firm has provided design development and construction management since 2016. In 2020, the fair took place in a 3,300 square meters court used for playing jai alai, a sport similar to racquetball, at historic event space Frontón Mexico. 
• Parque Experimental El Eco, a temporary installation in the courtyard of Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, awarded through the museum’s annual competition. The project transformed the space through an “everyday infrastructure” that included tables, chairs, a grill, an inflatable pool, and grass.
• Lodos, an art gallery in the Colonia Juárez neighborhood of Mexico City. A pine wood structure detached from existing walls serves as a kind of scaffolding onto which other elements can be added. 

Escandón Cesarman holds a BArch from Universidad Iberoamericana and an MA in economics from Centro de Investigación y Docencia Econômicas in Mexico City. He received an MS in architecture studies in design (SMArchS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Roxo Matias holds a BArch and an MArch from Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal. 

APRDELESP’s work has been published in CARTHA, PLAT, Harvard Design Magazine, Log, Arquine, and others. The studio has published A Manifesto on the Appropriation of Space: a Methodology for Making Architecture (Gato Negro Ediciones, 2019) and Notes on Winnie-the-Pooh’s house-tree (Ediciones Hungría, 2019). 

The studio has participated in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the 2018 Lisbon Architecture Triennale.

Learn more:

• • “Wayfinding” by APRDELESP & Daniel Díaz Monterrubio, CARTHA Magazine, 2019
  • “Question Guys” by David Huber, Harvard Design Magazine, No.44 / Seventeen
  • “Arquitectura promiscua” by Alfonso Fiero, Arquine, 2019 (in Spanish)