APRDELESP
Ana Miljački speaks with Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman and Guillermo Gonzalez Ceballos of Mexico City-based practice APRDELESP about their case studies, the creation of architectural institutions, and designing appealing “spaces of encounter.”
Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman and Guillermo Gonzalez Ceballos founded APRDELESP in 2012 in Mexico City. They consider their work in terms of case studies and describe their architectural office as a practice-as-research on space and its appropriation. According to Cesarman and Ceballos, the most important among their case studies are the Mexican pavilion for the 18th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2023 Venice Biennale, which presented the campesino basketball court as a utopian infrastructure; Lodos, an art gallery renovation in 2021; contemporary art fair Feria Material; Art Fair Estacion Material; a pavilion and event Parque Experimental El Eco in 2016; the self-initiated furniture store Muebles Sullivan; and Café Zena, a long, narrow space for events or all kinds defined by a long communal table. They have exhibited their work as well as taught and given lectures across the globe, including Mexico and the US, the UK, Sweden, Norway, Australia, and Japan. They were among the winners of the 2021 Architectural League Prize, and prior to their impressive Mexico pavilion in Venice, participated in the Chicago and Shenzen biennials. You can find their writing in Log, Tank, Plat, Harvard Design Magazine, Scapegoat, and elsewhere. The way Cesarman and Ceballos operate APREDELESP and set its goals is unique in the field of architecture, from the vocabulary they use to describe it to the way they think about use.
About I Would Prefer Not To
Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To1Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture.
Transcript
Transcript forthcoming.