arquitectura911sc

arquitectura911sc is an independent practice based in Mexico City founded in 2002 by Saidee Springall and Jose Castillo committed to architecture, urban design and planning projects.

Their office is interested in negotiating urban complexities with the limitations imposed by political uncertainty, economic downturns, legal ambiguities and most of all, to the contingencies of time, which make the practice of architecture and urbanism a response to different forms of emergency.

Their way of practicing ranges from researching, teaching, curating, writing, to designing and building; hence the work is diverse in scale, program, focus and approach. The constituent idea in our work is the dual commitment to an architecture that connects the physical with the social, and an architecture that is grounded and informed by the city. We are interested in deploying through our work, professional and cultural relevance as well as a sense of agency.

arquitectura911sc has designed and built extensively for both public and private clients in housing, cultural, educational, infrastructure and retail programs, including the award-winning competitions for the expansion of the Spanish Cultural Center in Mexico City, the CEDIM in Monterrey and for a new Guadalajara Performing Arts Center, a 35,000 sq. meter, 3-theater facility currently under construction. arquitectura911sc recently finished a 750-unit low-income housing development in Iztacalco, Mexico City, which was awarded the 2011 National Housing Award, Mexicoʼs highest institutional award to a finished housing project.

Their urban planning work, includes urban transportation corridors in the peripheries of Mexico City and the Master Plan for a neighborhood in northwest area of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, focusing in public space renewal and infrastructure, that recently won the Bronze Award in the Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction Latin America.

The work and research of arquitectura911sc has been published extensively both in Mexico and abroad and also been showcased at the 2005 Sao Paulo Biennale, the 2007 Rotterdam Biennale, Visionary Power, the exhibition Dirty Work, Transforming Landscape in the Non-Formal City of the Americas at Harvardʼs GSD in 2008, as part of the Mexican Pavillion of the XI Venice Architecture Biennale in September of 2008, at the Mexican Contemporary Architecture Exhibition in Victoria, Australia, and in the exhibition Our Cities Ourselves at the Center for Architecture in NYC, Mexico and many other countries.