Frida Escobedo Lecture

Frida Escobedo is an architect and designer based in Mexico City. Her work focuses largely on the reactivation of urban spaces that are considered to be residual or forgotten, through projects that range from housing and community centers, to hotels, galleries, and public art installations. In addition to her practice, Frida Escobedo has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is the recipient of the 2016 Architectural Review Emerging Architecture Award, the 2017 Architectural League Emerging Voices Award, and in 2018 was selected to design the 18th Serpentine Summer Pavilion in London. During spring 2019 she was a visiting professor at RICE University and is currently teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Frida Escobedo Architecture Studio is based in Mexico City. We share a small building in Colonia Juarez with Estudio Herrera, a studio specializing in art direction and editorial design. The diversity of disciplines that converge in the building, as well as the number of events and informal talks that are hosted in this space, are a constant influence to the work we develop, extending from art and installation to research and academia.

This cross-disciplinary approach has led us to understand our own practice as a language that — as with the written word — grows via deposition and erosion as it is inhabited and personalized, transferred and translated over time. For the pavilion in El Eco Museum, we approached the space like the spread of a blank page, using only cinder blocks as a structural alphabet: literal concrete poetry. This temporary project has a second iteration, developed in 2015 for the Rebuild Foundation in Chicago, where it will become a courtyard for the Stony Island Arts Bank.