"Almost Architecture: For Mexico City’s Art Week, an exhibition on reuse and preservation takes over a former thread-and-textile factory," The Architect's Newspaper, Feb. 11, 2026.
"In Reuse: Architectures of Almost Nothing, it may be hard to discern the architectural works on display. For the exhibition, which opened in correspondence with Mexico City’s Art Week, the curators invited 15 local and international practices to explore reuse of site-specific materials without creating models of possible structures or functional objects. Central to the cues offered to the architects was the site of the exhibition, Laguna, a converted former thread-and-textile factory, and its surrounding neighborhood, Colonia Doctores, an industrial area with an abundance of car shops on the edge of the rapidly redeveloping Roma and Juárez districts. . . .
"The results are ethereal, uncanny, and abstract, recalling the famous 1969 Kunsthalle Bern show Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Becomes Form, which defined the emerging postminimalist and Arte Povera movements of the time. In Free Play (2026), Belgian architects 51N4E’s installation on the main exhibition floor, a pile of orange balls of fabric bundled in perforated green sacks imitates venders’ method of transporting produce to markets. A tented construction of metal tubes contains another collection of fabric oranges, its structure extending from a triangular base into a tubular circle, from which a single faux orange hangs suspended on a thread. At the other end of the gallery floor, Bangkok Tokyo Architecture’s The Horse and the Ox (2026), which consists of four blue barrels, a section of aluminum ductwork, and an assemblage of stepped red bricks, appears to levitate. In reality, each element is raised from the ground by long machine screws bolted to the materials with metal brackets.
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The exhibition, repurposing and giving new meaning to existing materials, is a decent metaphor for Laguna and for the city at large, which is metabolically morphing itself into one of the world’s great global metropolises."
