"Mexico City’s Locus Blends Vernacular Architecture with Climate Reparations," Metropolis, Fall 2025.
The way Sana Frini describes it, the heat waves engulfing Europe and the U.S. each year are like a creeping monster slowly moving northward. “The heat advances an average of one meter per hour,” Frini says. “So it’s something that you can literally see moving from the South to the North.” Measurable scientifically and no longer preventable, according to some activists and researchers, the climate crisis becomes a problem of repair and remediation. “Given the state of the world as they have left it to us, I consider myself very much within the discourse of repair,” she says.
Alongside Jachen Schleich, with whom she cofounded Mexico City–based Locus Architects in 2020, Frini has turned her attention to climate reparation, bringing an energetic perspective that borrows from vernacular techniques of subtropical regions to improve resiliency, conserve energy, and maintain the comfort of the human body.
“It’s a bit like the logic of experimenting, prototyping, but above all, analyzing, from a vernacular architectural perspective,” she says of her practice and teaching. “I really believe in an architecture that is not of the epoch of the Anthropocene or of the era of fossil-fuel production.”
Take Chinampa Veneta, Locus’s contribution to the 2025 Venice Biennale for the Mexican Pavilion, designed in collaboration with various landscape designers, architects, and farmers. It borrows formal and agricultural references from the pre-Spanish-conquest Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. Within the pavilion, Locus created a verdant living installation demonstrating the agricultural system of the chinampa—a food system used by the Mexica people to convert the pervasive wetlands of the Valley of Mexico into a productive landscape by using logs to cultivate food on top of artificial islands.
“[The chinampa] is something obvious to Mexicans, but for us it’s fascinating ... the whole logic of circular production and the impressive efficiency of this ecosystem. We found a parallel in Venetian culture.”
At the time when they won the competition for the Venice Pavilion, Schleich and Frini had recently completed a design for the Michelin-starred restaurant Baldío. The elevated eatery in Colonia Condesa serves zero-waste cuisine and uses ingredients sourced from regenerative agriculture in cooperation with Arca Tierra, an organization dedicated to reviving the chinampas.
Schleich had a connection to local wood craftsmen since his earliest days in Mexico City in 2006, when he arrived from Zurich to work on a set for a theatrical production. A graduate of ETH Zurich and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, he met his future wife during that project and stayed on, eventually becoming a partner in a local architecture studio.
It was there in November 2016 that he met Frini—a self-described climate “nerd,” outsider, and polymath born and raised in Tunisia—who had pursued studies in architecture, urban studies, and political science in Carthage, Lyon, Seville, and Lisbon. “I flew to Mexico thinking I was coming on a yearlong contract, and I met Jachen the first day I arrived, in fact—it’s his fault,” Frini says. They became fast friends: They were both foreigners drawn to Mexico City’s architectural vibrancy and shared a passionate curiosity for material-driven climate solutions. They later left their respective studios to form Locus.
Alongside its architectural work, Locus runs a consultancy for developers and other architects, applying a sustainable living standard to help clients reduce energy, water use, and carbon emissions. “This gives me a chance to test what we preach with others as well as to test it internally,” Schleich tells me in the Locus office in the neighborhood of Juárez, overlooking the mountains to the south.
At the time of the Chinampa Veneta project’s conception, Frini was also deeply entrenched in cocurating, alongside Philippe Rahm, Four Degrees Celsius Between You and Me, an exhibition at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture of Versailles that explored climate adaptation in and around Paris. It is part of the Île-de-France Biennial of Architecture and Landscape.
“We proposed to bring the heat that already exists in the South to the North,” Frini says. “The context that motivated us and seemed really interesting was the phenomenon of the tropicalization of the Mediterranean and the Mediterraneanization of the northern part of the globe. It basically involves the tools that all these people in the Global South are working with.”
Like the Venice Pavilion, Locus adopted a collaborative model, inviting 15 universities, 58 architects, three cineasts, 12 writers, and one artist, to explore climate solutions, imagining Paris in the year 2100, anticipating summer temperatures rising by as much as 5°C. The exhibition again emphasized vernacular techniques originating from southern regions, such as the venting of hot air from buildings using traditional materials, thermal differentials, and the geometry of chimneys to produce cool interiors.
Rather than looking toward modern architecture, Frini believes real innovation today is emerging from precedents in southern regions, pre-industrial models that open the door to a much more efficient architecture not subject to the logic of economic globalization. “We were looking at how to cool ourselves faced with climate change on a global scale without depending on fossil fuel energy, using the logic and know-how of people who have already lived in these conditions for a long time,” she says.
Locus has quickly turned itself into a resource for climate-friendly design on the Mexico City architecture scene. For the expansive landscape intervention of Iñaki Echeverría in the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park—a major flood mitigation project for the government—the firm collaborated on a tropical, timber-framed building planned to house a culinary institute, using shou sugi ban surfaces to promote long-term durability. “It’s very hard and very resistant and requires few public resources for maintenance, because it won’t have almost any budget for maintenance,” Schleich says of the charred tropical timber. “It has to be almost indestructible in a way. This is also somewhat of a tradition of the Mexican government to make buildings so robust, which is why everything is concrete or hammered concrete. This is the wood version of that philosophy.”
Back in Juárez, redevelopment is happening all around Locus’s office. It’s hard to avoid the fact that many of the new restaurants in the center of Mexico City, like Baldío and Makan, appeal to an upscale clientele, while costs of living have increased far beyond the means of average local salaries. As older buildings are renovated and inexpensive lots are converted into luxury buildings, economic and cultural tensions have given rise to a potent antigentrification movement, accompanied by antiforeigner, antigringo, and anti-cultural-change speeches. While local building regulations and government policies are just starting to address the need for ecological design, affordable housing in popular neighborhoods, and regulations on Airbnbs, Locus’s dynamic office is a fitting reflection of the contemporary vigor of Mexico City, squarely focused on climate-sensitive design and practical solutions.
