This fall and winter, the League’s monthly First Friday series is shifting to a new online format and day of the week: Thursday. Expanding our reach beyond New York City, each event explores design practices that operate in multiple roles—coupling architecture with initiatives including design advocacy, fabrication research, and community engagement.

Each program, conducted onsite at an office or recent project, consists of brief presentations about the practice and its work, relationship to the local context, and impetus for creating alternative modes of practice. An informal conversation with attendees follows.

PRODUCTORA is a Mexico City-based architecture studio founded in 2006 by Abel Perles, Carlos Bedoya, Victor Jaime, and Wonne Ickx. Its work is characterized by precise geometries, creating “buildings that are legible and understandable by the community that uses them,” as the studio describes it. In 2011, in collaboration with curator and art critic Ruth Estevez, PRODUCTORA founded LIGA, Space for Architecture as a platform to promote emerging Latin American architecture through exhibitions, workshops, and public programs. 

PRODUCTORA recently published Being The Mountain, a book that investigates the relationship between modern architecture and topography.

Recent and ongoing projects include:

• Bautista House, located on a beachfront near Tulum, is built with an organic blue-colored concrete that reacts to light exposure over time, creating tones that range from blue to sunset pink.
• Teopanzolco Cultural Center consists of two intertwined triangular volumes that relate directly to the pre-Hispanic pyramids of Teopanzolco in Cuernavaca, generating new public spaces in the archaeological site. The project, a collaboration with Isaac Broid, won the 2018 Oscar Niemeyer Award for Latin American Architecture.
• Houston Endowment Headquarters, winner of an international design competition for a new office building, is conceived as a light and elegant structure. The project is a collaboration with Kevin Daley Architects, and construction is due to start in 2021.