MEXTRÓPOLI, a great architecture forum in Mexico City

From 17 to 20 March 2018, Mexico City will host the MEXTRÓPOLI forum, a unique event in Latin America that for four days will focus on a new vision on town planning. It will be an occasion to present the Casa Suiza Pavilion created by Mexican studio Dellekamp, a structure that hosted the MEXTRÓPOLI 2017 meetings.


For four days, the fifth edition of MEXTRÓPOLI, organised by magazine Arquine, will transform Mexico City into an architecture forum gathering architects, town planners, students, artists and influencers. Among the guests, great architecture masters and emergent architects, that will be listened to by an audience of over 52,000 people who will get to know more about architecture and town planning through the congresses, workshops, debates, exhibitions and educational events held at this forum entitled “¡Vive la ciudad extraordinaria!”.
While waiting for the start of this great creativity festival mostly held in the historical centre of Mexico City, that this year will also be the World Capital of Design, here is an overview of the architecture of the pavilion realised by the Dellekamp Arquitectos studio for MEXTRÓPOLI 2017.
The building, named “Casa Suiza”, or the “Swiss Home”, was born to celebrate the 70th year of diplomatic relations between Switzerland and Mexico and to create a dedicated meeting place. The Dellekamp Arquitectos studio started working on its design without a defined schedule or site, so they created a modular system based on a triangular grid allowing the pavilion to be adapted to different places and different needs.
Highly sustainable, in line with the Swiss tradition, all the prefabricated modules composing the building, in certified pine plywood with metal hinges, were exclusively made in Mexico. Easy to mount and dismount, this project demonstrated once more the great qualities of wood as a structural material.
The two-level architecture designed by Dellekamp Arquitectos totals 171 square meters; it has a maximum height of 6 metres, and it is 18.3 metres wide and 11.50 metres deep. Adaptability is the strong point the Casa Suiza pavilion, that can become itinerant and can be mounted and unmounted easily without negative environmental impacts, as it happened in the past year at the Alameda Central, the heart of the Mextrópoli festival. The structure was designed to be a seamless open space and demonstrated all of its potential hosting some of the key events of MEXTRÓPOLI 2017.
In the rich MEXTRÓPOLI 2018 programme, some events are worth mentioning, such as the UNFINISHED exhibition, at the Spain Pavilion, that won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of Biennale di Venezia (link) and the RecostruirMX workshop, presenting an initiative of Mexican architects that was born in Mexico as a response to last autumn’s earthquake.

Christiane Bürklein

Project: Dellekamp Arquitectos | Derek Dellekamp & Jachen Schleich - http://dellekamparq.com/esp/
Location: Alameda Central, Ciudad de México.
Year: 2017
Images: Sandra Pereznieto | http://pereznieto.com/
Other particpantss: José Manuel Estrada (líder de proyecto), Alice Seban, Gustavo Hernández, Eduardo Cabral, Benoist Rouel-Brax, Laura Alonso, Antoine Vaxelaire, Javier Ramírez, Valentina Sánchez
MEXTRÓPOLI, dal 17 al 20 marzo 2018. Programma completo: http://www.arquine.com/agenda-especial-mextropoli-2018/