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Iturbide Studio
About the project
Graciela Iturbide is a Mexican photographer, famous for black and white photographs of Mexican peasant women. She commissioned her son Mauricio Rocha, who runs the Taller de Arquitectura together with Gabriela Carrillo, with a special building: Her studio was to be erected on an empty lot in the immediate vicinity of the house. Her only condition: It had to be made of brick.
The architects more than fulfilled this requirement. On the 7x14-meter plot, they built a three-story brick turret that rises out of the fabric of low-rise neighboring buildings. Consisting of three stacked, 28-square-meter rooms, the structure is flanked on the north and south sides by a patio. All rooms open through wall-sized sliding windows to the two courtyards.
All of the walls were made of reddish-brown, handmade bricks from a manufacturer in Puebla 150 kilometers away. One double row of flat, long bricks in an asymmetrical stretcher bond alternates with a series of twice as thick, standing bricks. Thanks to the openwork masonry, a play of light and shadow, which changes with the position of the sun during the day, emerges inside. Thus, the studio is shielded from the outside world without being completely disconnected from it.
"A work that above all sought silence, synthesis, continuous, repetitive
and almost obsessive use of a single material."
Brick is omnipresent in and out. Graciela Iturbide lovingly calls the building her "small factory of bricks."
