APRDELESP (since 2012) 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 should be available for public scrutiny.

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 realms and the exploration of the 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

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.
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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.
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3. A subspace, an architectural typology in continuous development conceived by APRDELESP, is a temporary, autonomous, ambiguous, non-hierarchical, 1:1 scale model. Subspaces work as public-facing infrastructure and as an extension of someone’s private workspace, encouraging experimentation and provoking unexpected encounters and relationships.
   
   Active subspaces: an online radio station (Radio Amigos) and a Riso print shop (MACOLEN).
   
   Inactive subspaces: a lobby-bar (La Pípí), an art gallery (Galería La Esperanza), an experimental park (Parque Experimental El Eco), a cafe (CAFÉ DES ARTISTES), a cafe (CAFÉ (ARCHIVO), an empalme stall (LOS EMPALMES), a cafe and furniture shop (MUEBLES SULLIVAN), two convenience stores (CBR), and a cafe (CAFÉ ZENA),.
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