🏰 PRÓXIMAMENTE: El Castillo de Chapultepec 🏰 · 😊 MACOLEN 😊 · 👀 Radio Amigos 👀 · ⌂ APRDELESP ⌂ ·
APRDELESP (antes TILICHE )

APRDELESP is an architecture office based in Mexico City: a practice-as-research1 on space and its appropriation.

The typology of a traditional architecture practice takes form in private-facing infrastructure investments, like office space, privileged over public-facing infrastructure investments, like a website or a karaoke bar. This model is obsolete2. Isolation can be useful for a specific moment and under certain conditions, but an architecture practice must be able to open to the public, incorporating social participation into design process. Documenting and publishing information should be generated through an automatic mechanism that shares design progress in real time; Every decision is available for public scrutiny; every decision can spark a public dialogue.

As an architecture practice, APRDELESP invests with equal commitment in the public and private, physical and digital infrastructures of the office. We take the development of these spaces and the exploration of intersections between them as both fundamental to the daily functioning of our office and as a mode of research into the forces of appropriation. We believe architecture firms are in a critical position to use their own office and other infrastructures as prototypic sites of spatial research and experimentation.

APRDELESP: Current Office Structure

Private Infrastructure Public Infrastructure
Physical Infrastructure Mansion-studio (archive, laboratory, school, office, and residence):

🏰  El Castillo de Chapultepec

APRDELESP temporary offices

 Subspaces:

🍺  La Pipí (lobby-bar)
🖼  Galería La Esperanza (art gallery)
🏖  PARQUE EXPERIMENTAL EL ECO
🎨  CAFÉ DES ARTISTES
🗄  CAFÉ (ARCHIVO)
👀  RADIO AMIGOS (online radio station)
🌮  LOS EMPALMES
🎤  MUEBLES SULLIVAN
😊  MACOLEN (print shop)
🥪  CBR
✌  CAFÉ ZENA (cafe)
Digital Infrastructure Organization, communication, and archive softwares aprdelesp.com

Physical Infrastructure

Our physical infrastructure consists of two parts: a private one that functions as an office, laboratory, school, archive, and house –an architectural typology in continuous development that we temporarily name mansion-studio– and a network of subspaces3 that we use as a public extension.

Digital Infrastructure

Our digital infrastructure consists of two parts: a series of software products for organization, communication and online archiving as well as aprdelesp.com, a public website that is synchronized with our photo channel, our video channel, and our organization, communication, and archiving programs to collect and publish the information in real time. We never edit this information specifically for marketing or exhibition purposes.

Notes:

  1. “Making the decision that something is practice as research imposes on the practitioner-researcher a set of protocols that fall into: 1) the point that the practitioner-researcher must necessarily have a set of separable, demonstrable, research findings that are abstractable, not simply locked into the experience of performing it; and 2) it has to be such an abstract, which would set out the originality of the piece, set it in an appropriate context, and make it useful to the wider research community.”
    Piccini, Angela. 2002. “Parip/Practice as Research in Performance.” 2002. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/parip/t_ap.htm.
    [Regresar]
  2. Many architecture offices have digital public infrastructure (a website), which is usually a digital portfolio where a selection of work is displayed through with a few carefully selected images and a brief descriptive text. They also require digital tools (digital private infrastructure). Instead of reaping the full benefit of these tools, however, architects often communicate in a disorganized way through email and WhatsApp and use as their digital archive a local server with an improvised folder structure or a different version of each project on each collaborator’s computer.
    [Regresar]
  3. We define as a subspace a physical and/or digital model, 1:1 scale, developed to contribute actively to our ongoing research on space: social models, experiments, patient construction-demolition, constant motion, space-events, constructed situations, long-term discourse, public infrastructure, offices…; viable, changing, ambiguous, lacking in hierarchies, free!.
    Active subspaces: a lobby-bar (La Pípí), an art gallery (Galería La Esperanza), an online radio station (Radio Amigos), a cafe (CAFÉ ZENA), and a print shop (MACOLEN).
    Inactive subspaces: a furniture store and cafe (MUEBLES SULLIVAN), an experimental park and cafe (Parque Experimental El Eco), a cafe inside an art fair (CAFÉ DES ARTISTES), a cafe during a museum exhibition (CAFÉ (ARCHIVO), an empalme stand in an open market (LOS EMPALMES), and two convenience stores (CBR).
    [Regresar]

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