Louisiana Museum showcases the socially minded structure of Tatiana Bilbao

The work of Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao is on present on the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, in an exhibition that features an imaginary metropolis, a cupboard of curiosities and 4 full-size architectural mockups.

The Architect’s Studio: Tatiana Bilbao Estudio is the primary main worldwide retrospective for Bilbao, 47, whose broad-ranging portfolio contains social-housing prototypes, a botanical backyard, a pilgrimage route and an aquarium.

The present options an assortment of fashions, each massive and small, together with hand-drawn sketches, collaged pictures and materials samples.

The curation, by Kjeld Kjeldsen and Mette Marie Kallehauge, goals to indicate how Bilbao focuses on site-specificity and collaboration in her design course of, and is bored with growing a signature type.

“She is preoccupied with the particular place and human beings,” reads their exhibition textual content. “She operates with closeness and the non-public encounter, an method which may however finish in a serious venture in a megapolis in Mexico.”

A single picture is displayed on the exhibition entrance. It’s a collage that Bilbao created for a residential venture, that includes a drawing accomplished by hand overlaid on high of varied pictures of gardens and landscapes.

Kjeldsen sees collage as a very vital facet of the architect’s course of. Not solely is it collaborative, capable of be labored on by a number of individuals, additionally it is open-ended – not like a pc visualisation, it leaves some particulars open to interpretation.

“Within the exhibition, you do not see any sketches by laptop,” Kjeldsen advised Dezeen. “She desires to maintain an analogue method of doing issues. It is the best way she communicates with individuals.”

The present is split into three sections. The primary room, titled Landscapes, options a big plinth lined in fashions of tasks each accomplished and in course of.

These fashions are all the identical scale, however produced from varied totally different supplies, from pigmented concretes to woods. Highlights embody the Mazatlan Aquarium and the Irapuato Music Corridor and Sports activities Centre.

Beneath them, a hand-drawn map covers the floor of the plinth and extends out to cowl all the ground of the room. It connects all of the tasks, as in the event that they had been all in-built the identical metropolis.

Experimental Mexican group accommodates social housing by Tatiana Bilbao and Frida Escobedo

On the encircling partitions are artworks from each the Louisiana’s assortment and the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico Metropolis, supposed to arrange the concept of a cultural trade between the 2 totally different contexts.

The second space, titled Curiosities, consists of a bright-blue wall of shelving that shows the concepts and objects which have formed Bilbao’s designs.

It contains loads of collages, together with drawers stuffed with archive supplies that guests can discover.

In the primary exhibition area, the curators labored with Bilbao’s studio to supply full-size fragments of 4 totally different buildings.

Known as Locations, this part exhibits how the architect works with each pure and mass-produced parts and supplies.

Mirrors are positioned alongside partitions made up of ceramic tiles to symbolize Casa del Bosque, a vacation home in Monterrey. In the meantime the Culiacan Botanical Backyard is represented by a mixture of concrete parts and carpets.

The Mazatlan Aquarium additionally reappears on this part, alongside the brand new, rammed-earth home Staterra.

That is the third exhibition that the Louisiana has hosted as a part of The Architect’s Studio sequence, following retrospectives of Wang Shu and Alejandro Aravena. Bilbao will likely be adopted by one other feminine architect, Anupama Kundoo.

“In fact, the entire exhibition sequence is to do with totally different cultures,” stated Kjeldsen, who got here up with the concept for the sequence.

The curator hopes that guests to the present will see Bilbao as a sort of Robin Hood character, in the best way that she makes use of the proceeds from a few of her high-end commissions to fund her extra socially pushed tasks.

“In a method, she’s sort of robbing the wealthy to feed the poor!” he joked.

The exhibition continues till 5 April 2020.