Mexican Architecture

Mexican architecture and design is the body of building, interior and object design that grows out of Mexico's history, climate and crafts, from the stepped platforms of Teotihuacan to the concrete courtyard houses of Guadalajara today. Its recurring tools are the thick wall, the inward-looking patio, strong colour and regional materials such as volcanic stone, lime plaster and fired clay. It is also a living practice: studios across the country keep testing those tools against new programmes, new budgets and a hotter climate.

What is Mexican architecture and design?

The phrase covers more than a style. It takes in pre-Hispanic cities, the churches and haciendas of the colonial period, the public buildings and murals that followed the Mexican Revolution, the modernism of the mid twentieth century and the work of contemporary studios in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Mérida and Oaxaca. What ties these periods together is less a set of forms than a set of habits: a guarded face to the street, life organised around open-air rooms, materials left close to their natural colour or painted boldly, and a close relationship between architecture, landscape and art.

It overlaps with several neighbouring fields. Houses across the wider region, from Brazil to Chile, are discussed on the Latin American houses topic, and this article does not repeat that survey. The rural building traditions that fed into Mexican modernism, such as adobe, whitewash and the walled yard, belong to the broader story of vernacular architecture. What makes the Mexican case distinctive is how consciously its architects have returned to those traditions, at several points in the last century, as a source of national identity rather than as nostalgia.

Design here also reaches well beyond buildings. Furniture, ceramics, textiles, lettering and public art have long been treated as part of the same project, which is why a library facade can be a mosaic and a house can be planned around a single tree.

A short history of Mexican architecture and design

Pre-Hispanic cities. Long before the Spanish conquest, Mesoamerican cities were laid out as monumental landscapes of platforms, plazas and causeways. Teotihuacan, northeast of present-day Mexico City, is known for the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. In Oaxaca, Monte Albán served for close to a thousand years as a Zapotec capital, and the Maya built their own cities across the Yucatán peninsula. The idea of architecture as a stepped ground plane open to the sky never really left Mexican design.

Colonial churches and the hacienda. From the sixteenth century, New Spain built cathedrals, convents and parish churches that culminated in an exuberant late Baroque, often called Mexican Churrigueresque. In the countryside, the hacienda combined a main house, chapel, workshops and stores around walled courts. The cloister and the hacienda patio became two of the most durable spatial ideas in the country.

Revolution, murals and the university. After the Mexican Revolution, the state commissioned murals for public walls, and architects searched for a modern language that could carry national themes. The clearest result is the Ciudad Universitaria of UNAM in Mexico City. Its Central Library, opened in 1956, is wrapped in Juan O'Gorman's stone mosaic mural, and in July 2007 UNESCO inscribed the library and the central campus as World Heritage.

Modernism with roots. Luis Barragán, born in Guadalajara and linked early in his career with a movement devoted to regional traditions, received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1980. The prize describes his work as minimalist yet sumptuous in colour and texture, built from pure planes of stucco, adobe, timber and water. In his acceptance speech he named his sources plainly.

"The lessons to be learned from the unassuming architecture of the village and provincial towns of my country have been a permanent source of inspiration."

Luis Barragán, Pritzker Prize acceptance speech (1980)

Others carried the language in different directions. Félix Candela, born in Madrid, emigrated to Mexico and developed thin reinforced concrete shells, the cascarones, including the 1958 Los Manantiales restaurant in Xochimilco. Ricardo Legorreta co-founded his practice in 1965; the firm's own history lists the Camino Real Hotel in Mexico City alongside factories, offices and social housing for Infonavit. Today a generation that includes Tatiana Bilbao, Frida Escobedo and Mauricio Rocha works internationally while regional studios in Guadalajara, Mérida and Oaxaca build a large share of the country's most discussed houses.

Key principles of Mexican architecture and design

The wall that faces the street

Mexican houses rarely put their life on show. A solid or screened front protects a generous interior, and the threshold is handled as a sequence rather than a door. The uni.xyz journal on Casa CO by JDEstudio and Aagnes Studio describes a white box on a banded stone base, with a slatted screen filtering the upper floor.

"This is a familiar Guadalajara posture: a guarded exterior and a generous interior."

UNI Editorial, on Casa CO by JDEstudio and Aagnes Studio

The courtyard at the centre of the plan

From the cloister to the hacienda to the modern house, the patio is the room that organises all the others. In CASA DLCA by 0studio Arquitectura in Zapopan, a triple-height void cut through the centre of a 496 square metre house brings daylight and cross ventilation to every floor, with a stair wrapped around a planted tree. Student work picks up the same idea at a larger scale.

Colour as a building material

Colour in Mexican architecture is not applied at the end. It is mixed into plaster and concrete or painted across whole planes, and it changes with the light through the day. The uni.xyz journal on Red House by Ángel García Estudio in Bahías de Huatulco, Oaxaca, describes a 425 square metre home whose layout was shaped around three existing trees, including a Guayacán, a species the journal notes is at risk of extinction.

Regional stone, plaster and craft

Each region has its own palette. In Mérida, the Mimado restaurant by García de Alba and Ponce Arquitectos, featured in a uni.xyz journal, layers white chukum plaster and cantera stone, materials the journal says Yucatán builders know well, with oak and green glazed tile. Clay tile and pottery carry the same logic into objects: the talavera of Puebla and Tlaxcala is a craft tradition with Spanish roots that Mexican designers still draw on.

Shade, air and the screened facade

In hot, humid regions the wall becomes a filter. The journal on Casa Paseo de la Cantera by Antumbra Estudio in Colima describes a custom perforated concrete block screen at street level that lets light and air through while keeping the house private, combined with deep courtyards and timber framing.

Mexican architecture and design on uni.xyz

Members of uni.xyz approach Mexico from two directions: competition entries that respond to specific Mexican sites, and editorial journals that study built work by Mexican studios.

Eco Bio Tent by 용상 조 and 연수 김, a winning entry in the Xocolatl competition, proposes a resort in Tabasco that uses recycled cacao husks, an outer wall of oyster shell mortar that the team relates to Mayan architecture, and a spiral roof to limit heat and sunlight. Camino del Cacao, entered in the same competition, places its resort in Comalcalco around a central courtyard.

The Mexican Nano Nest by Cezary Loj, from the Nano Nest 2020 competition, simplifies the structure of a family house to make it cheaper to build and uses shared rooms so that each private room can be larger. Its board places the project in Guadalajara and builds a multi-generation family into the brief.

Women's Bastion by Robin Mueller and Muhamad Ariqyandri, from the Parasitic Architecture 2020 competition, is a small structure designed to attach to dense parts of Mexico City and address safety and inequality; the team writes that it can be adapted to different locations to reach more people.

Two entries in the Down Below competition look at the space under highways in San Luis Potosí. Liston Oasis by naomi molina and Namira Budhwani sits under the Benito Juárez highway interchange, where its board shows ribbons of fabric on a metal frame slowly taken over by vines. Cosmic Flow by Marium Azab proposes a multi-level recreational space under a highway that draws on the heritage of the Huastec people.

El Patio by Paola Prieto treats an urban park in Guadalajara as a shared courtyard for the city. The boards show a water channel planted with trees, a farmers market and amphitheatre steps of exposed concrete that the design expects to fill with water in the rainy season.

The journals add built work by Mexican practices. Beyond the houses above, they cover Hummingbird House by Estudio Libre MX in southern Mexico City, organised around a lap pool; Herradura House by Zona Arquitectura Más Ingeniería in Jalisco, which gives rubble stone, red brick and board-formed concrete separate walls and roles; and the OTAY Cross Border Xpress by LEGORRETA, a terminal arranged around a central courtyard shaded by an ash tree.

Challenges and future directions

The most pressing questions are about who gets to live in good Mexican architecture. Celebrated houses are mostly large private commissions, while the Nano Nest brief starts from the fact that city-centre housing is becoming unaffordable for many families. Translating the patio, the screen and the thick wall into dense, low-cost housing is unfinished work.

Public space is a second front. The journal on the Tepoztlán Market by Laboratorio Regional de Arquitectura and Ramírez Suárez Arquitectos describes a municipal market built under SEDATU's Urban Improvement Program to move street vendors from the historic centre into a new building near the Convent of the Nativity of Mary, a World Heritage site. Projects like this test whether new public buildings can respect heritage without freezing a town in place.

Climate is the third. Heat, water scarcity and heavy seasonal rain all appear in member work, from El Patio's flooding steps to the shaded roofs of the Tabasco resorts. Finally there is the border: Turning Borders by Fernando Careaga, Marisol Hurtado and Tania Valencia designs street furniture for the Tijuana and San Diego region, where the line itself shapes daily life. The risk across all of this is cliché. Pink walls and papel picado are easy; reading a site the way Barragán read village squares is harder.

Mexican architecture and design for students and designers

For a thesis, the strongest Mexican subjects start from a real condition rather than a palette: housing for extended families, markets and the informal economy, heat in the Bajío and the coast, the land under elevated highways, or the cross-border city. Study a building type in plan and section first. The courtyard house and the screened street wall are worth drawing by hand before borrowing them, and the shift from early concrete modernism to today's practices is traced on the modern architecture topic.

Competitions are a good way to test those ideas against a brief. Browse open briefs on uni.xyz competitions, and look at how entries such as Bamboo Home answer crowding in Mexico City with light, ventilation and green space rather than with style.

Frequently asked questions

What are the main features of Mexican architecture?

Thick walls with a closed face to the street, interiors organised around patios and courtyards, bold colour applied to whole planes, and regional materials such as volcanic stone, cantera, lime plaster, brick and clay tile. Water, gardens and murals are often treated as part of the architecture.

Who are the most important Mexican architects?

Luis Barragán, the 1980 Pritzker laureate, is the best known. Juan O'Gorman, Félix Candela and Ricardo Legorreta shaped the modern period, and Tatiana Bilbao, Frida Escobedo and Mauricio Rocha are among the leading contemporary names.

Why is colour so important in Mexican design?

Colour has long been part of village streets, markets and crafts, and Barragán named the colourful streets of provincial towns among his sources. Architects use it to give simple volumes depth and to mark changes of light through the day.

What is the difference between Mexican and Spanish colonial architecture?

Mexican colonial buildings used Spanish models but were built by local craftspeople with local stone and decoration. The late Baroque, often called Mexican Churrigueresque, developed its own exuberant character in New Spain.

Is Ciudad Universitaria a World Heritage Site?

Yes. In July 2007 UNESCO inscribed the central campus of UNAM's Ciudad Universitaria, including the Central Library with Juan O'Gorman's mosaic mural.

References and further reading

• Luis Barragán, 1980 Laureate, The Pritzker Architecture Prize
• Luis Barragán, Ceremony Acceptance Speech (1980), The Pritzker Architecture Prize
• Teotihuacan, Wikipedia
• Central Library (UNAM), Wikipedia
• Félix Candela, Wikipedia
• The Firm: history and philosophy, LEGORRETA