Be Critical, Adapt Constantly, and Connect

The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices award spotlights North American individuals and firms with distinct design voices that have the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. This year, the League posed a series of questions to the eight practices that received a 2024 award, prompting each firm or individual to reflect on their working theories and methods, the opportunities and challenges of contemporary practice, and what’s next.

Luis Enrique Flores and Armida Fernández founded Estudio ALA in Guadalajara in 2012. Often designing for industrial and agricultural contexts, the design studio’s built work and research projects engage creatively with established economic and social structures to balance history and context with design interventions. Below, Flores and Fernández discuss creating projects that become a part of culture.

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What does it mean to be an “emerging” practice or practitioner?

Armida: It means responsibility, ethics, a constant reflection on our work; addressing critical needs in our practice in terms of labor practices, social dynamics, and material flows; being critical with existing design culture and how it might be transformed through time; questioning who we are, what we have done, and where we want to go…

Luis Enrique: It means that our intuition, processes, methodologies, experiences, and understanding up to this point in our practice have entered a new cycle of evolution. This evolutionary process might take the rest, or at least a good part, of our careers. It requires deep and critical analysis to address the issues that the discipline demands without leaving behind

the users and the spatial, tactile, programmatic, and cultural experience of a place.

What does it mean for you to share your “voice” in the design field, in your community, in your practice?

More than our individual voice, we aspire to share the voice of a place.Luis Enrique: Again, it means responsibility and understanding the work has the potential of influencing others. It also means that listening and observing combined with research and other methodologies have enormous potential within the design fields.

Armida: It means to share the voice of different layers of a site: the culture, history, landscape, and materials of a place; to create a common language between the place and the project, being aware of its natural values and at the same time, being aware and critical of the time we live in… How can space be part of this needed transformation?

To share our voice is to share distinct relations, dynamics, and flows that often are not visible and how design makes them visible—hierarchies can be fragmented and new forms of behavior generated. By being more flexible, sustainable, and porous, we can create common ground instead of borders that divide us. As a great mentor Dilip Da Cunha says, rather than designing as a solution, design as initiation.

Where do you locate your practice environmentally, socially, and within the design field? 

Luis Enrique: We believe that the physical and social environments are interconnected. We try to listen and decipher what is appropriate and logical to do in every project. We “read” every place for spaces that we consider valuable, worthy, and that give dignity to the society or community. Then, we think about how to highlight, continue, or improve those aspects, relating to both organization and physical structure.

The question of material comes implicitly, which for us always has a social, cultural and ecological impact: what comes from the place; what is made locally; what has minimal ecological impact in its manufacturing process; if the community benefits from its use, or if the community can be involved in the installation.

Armida: We think of how to design less as a typology and more as a prototype—redefining a project, making it more flexible and open, and at the same time clear in its meaning, rooted to its place, and environmentally conscious. How can our process go beyond collage as a method and embody collage as a culture in the sense of Roland Barthes: an independent

force of different layers and events. We work beyond architectural examples, allowing intuition to flow, reflecting on relationships and dynamics, socially and environmentally, challenging established hierarchies, connecting to time, place, and people, listening to what they reveal to us.

What do you see as the main challenges for your firm’s practice in today’s economic, environmental, and political climate?

Armida: The challenge is to understand that we are in constant transformation. It is important to question the meanings, relationships, and actions of what we do and what surrounds us. The question here is: How can we spatialize transformation, focusing less on the object and more on what happens to it? I believe we are in a need for a more dynamic spatiality, a space of flows. Life is more about feeling than seeing; I believe that inhabiting spaces is similar: rather than seen, they are felt and experienced.

Also, we should constantly question the meaning of development, often returning to nature. A building should be resilient, mindful, beautiful, and charged with meaning. We all have different rights and beauty should be one—the right to feel beauty in our homes, the places we work, our neighborhood, and our town or city.

Luis Enrique: We have seen a huge shift in architecture in the last few years. We see this moment as an opportunity to work differently, to bring solutions and new conversations to the table. And we have seen that these solutions are viable in our everyday work. For example, rethinking programs and materials that were not commonly used in a specific context: suddenly we find an openness and positive attitude from clients to incorporate into their projects.

Urgency creates the opportunity for something positive and better. We have a responsibility to respond the best we can to that opportunity, which of course is a huge challenge.

When you are deciding whether to take on a project or collaboration, what questions do you ask yourself? 

Armida: What are the principle values of the region in terms of history, culture, landscape, material? What’s the language of the place? How to respond? What meanings should the project represent? How can we collaborate with the collective of people, living things, and nature? How can the project respond to the site in a way that honors the place?

Luis Enrique: How can we improve the quality of living—socially, ecologically, culturally—in this project. How can we avoid assumptions? How can we create common ground where everyone involved can contribute to a renewed and better story that they feel part of? How can we make empathy flow through the process and in the result to create a stronger sense of belonging?

What questions do you ask the client or collaborator?

Armida: Before asking them, we try to listen. We try to understand what values are important to them: natural values, economic values, social values…

How would you define research in your practice?

Armida: Research is the nourishment of the project. Depending on the typology, scale, and program, we use different qualitative and quantitative design methodologies. Sometimes we have more time and space to pursue more research in one project than another. The challenge is pushing to make space for research to happen in between the accelerated rhythm life and the desire to respond to what the research reveals.

Luis Enrique: It has become very important since very early in our practice to incorporate research through specific projects that made us think and see differently. We have always been aware that a single-sided perspective wasn’t our aspiration. We pursued research projects which allowed us to cross-pollinate learned findings and lessons to other projects in our practice, until suddenly they became an unseparated whole where initial research projects and new values become part of every new project.

Do you teach? What is the interplay between your teaching and practice?

Armida: Not at the moment. I will get back to teaching design studio next semester, sooner than I thought. I have a 2-year-old son, and I’ve found myself in a constant search for balance between being a mother and a practitioner. Speaking of teaching, being a mother has given me a different perspective and taught me to be a better practitioner. Something that I ask myself is how to teach intuition and empathy.

I see teaching and practice as one entity. In one way or another, they are or should be connected in terms of processes, values, intentions, design culture, etc. On one side you have the time and space to question, and on the other you have time and space to develop and make things happen.

Luis Enrique: Personally, they are completely interconnected as I understand my practice as an architect and teacher as a complete whole, a fabric that I interweave, connect, and extend every day.

Teaching becomes a simulator of practice where I work with students to clarify their own ideas and interests. I share design processes, strategies of observation, research, and synthesis that create a conceptual toolbox from which one can operate in complex situations. This clarifies my own practice as this is how I usually operate, needing to solve problems quickly with

ordered and clear thinking. A classroom also lacks all the distractions, meetings and financial situations that require a great amount of versatility and skills in today’s practice.

Do you prefer to work in a certain scale or typology, or do your projects range in scope? Is there a project type that you would like to design for but have not yet?

Armida: We have designed workspaces, corporate offices, distillery factories, distribution centers, hospitality, housing, spiritual spaces, among others. I believe it is healthy for the mind to work through different scales and typologies, since with each new typology we work on, we arrive with a humbler attitude towards the project.

We believe the scale really doesn’t matter, what matters more to us is the message and the meaning of a project, and how it can have a good influence on its immediate context in terms of landscape, people, environment etc. It becomes part of the culture.

Luis Enrique: Naturally and consciously, our practice has led us to work with different programs and projects evolving in scale. We find this positive, enriching, and we see it as widening the range of possibilities for practice. This versatile approach has allowed us to engage into conversations that lead to projects where our discipline can have a voice about the social, ecological, and political issues.

When do you consider a project complete?

Armida: A project is complete when it takes on its own autonomy, when events happen in the frames we designed. I don’t know if it’s complete or if it’s transformed. We should care and reflect more about the post-occupancy stage: maintenance, how it’s been used or was meant to be used, how the community responds to the project, its environmental impact. There is so much to reflect on. Sometimes we are not aware of ways in which use causes social, natural, political, and environmental impact, which can be either negative or positive.

Luis Enrique: Honestly, I have never had a feeling of completeness before thinking that some aspect of the project was not right. Now, I’m starting to understand that this is something that adds value to a project in a dialectical sense, something that aspires towards a holistic and process-oriented result.

How did you meet your partner? How did you decide to practice together

Armida: We met during our bachelor’s studies in 2010, through some friends in common, and we started dating in 2011. After a year, after some good conversations, shared interests, books, and travels, we started working together and founded Estudio ALA.

Luis Enrique: We decided to practice together when we realized that we had common interests but very different perspectives that could merge and enrich the process and the work.

Can you name a person, book, film, or other source of inspiration?

Armida: Nature, culture, community, handcraft, conversations.

Luis Enrique: Same, plus leisure time for contemplation.

Are there references, of any sort, that you find yourself drawing on again and again?

Luis Enrique: Sections with human scale to define the proportions of people in space and their relationship to a specific place.

What did you last draw?

Armida: Watercolors with my son and a section of a theater.

Luis Enrique: A section for a potential client.

What do you need to do your best work?

Armida: Putting our mind and heart into it.

Luis Enrique: And a client willing to do more than only a building.

What’s next?

Armida: To always keep questioning, being sensitive, critical, and going outside of our comfort zone.

Luis Enrique: To question, be critical, adapt constantly, and connect at the same time. To be resilient and open to evolving ways of practicing, especially in moments of change like today’s.