Team: Jorge Urias Garza, César Valles, Hugo Santana
Location: Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
Type: Residential Tower - Competition
Status: Finalist
Year: 2017

Our project was awarded Finalist in a competition for a Residential Tower on the desertic city of Juárez, México. The project represents an important proposal for an architectural milestone, as the first large-scale residential tower in the city.

Located at the side of one of the largest and greenest areas on Juarez, a prominent feature in a desertic city, our approach was to create a tower that reacts to the park. We embarked on the study of the natural phenomenon of “crown shyness”, a behavior in which trees respect each other’s space in the canopy of the forest. Under this premise, we created the layout for the building, bringing a natural and geometrical force that shapes the forest into our proposal.

The structural grid of parallel columns reacts to the intensity of the light, with more frequent columns in the sun-exposed areas, and space for the view of the neighboring green space. This dance of light and concrete becomes a prominent feature of the building, and creates a crown at the top-most floor, shining over the city skyline. 

Team: Jorge Urias Garza, Alberto Carrillo, Alberto Duarte, Hugo Santana
Location: Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
Type: Commercial Building
Status: Built
Year: 2016
Photography: Rafael Gamo

A commercial structure that stems from the relationship of its inhabitants and their local surroundings; a raw texture that becomes the building's skin. The material is exposed tilt-up concrete panels with a recessed textured pattern inspired in the relationship among settlers in the vicinity.
The commercial building is inside the Anapra neighborhood of Juarez Mexico, a place with richness of textures and exposed materials, where the built environment can be seen as a reflection of its people's creativity portrayed in their unique housing construction systems.

Team: Jorge Urias Garza, Alberto Carrillo, Nancy Laredo
Location: Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
Type: Commercial
Status: Built
Year: 2015
Photography: Rafael Gamo

Team: Jorge Urias Garza, Hugo Santana, Cesar Valles, Mariana Murguia
Location: Lima, Peru
Type: Competition
Year: 2016

Our proposal for the Lima Art Museum New Contemporary Art Wing is born through the relationships between the site and the city. Taking strongly into consideration a series of studies at different scales, from the relationship with the historic existing museum palace, to the incorporation with the Exhibition Park, and the essence that exists today in the public spaces on the city of Lima.
The new underground building is rooted on the site reacting to the relationships with the city, and is intersected through a rigorous grid that extends from the existing museum onto the new wing. The new wing is placed three floors underground, all with natural light and access to terraces and gardens at different points. The underground displacement of the new wing provides unobstructed views of the existing museum palace at street level.
The top floor plazas incorporate ramps and stairs connecting to the metro stations and the Dammert Park. The design of both the building and the plaza have a series of scaled surfaces that help diffuse ambient noise, and also provides a dynamic effect throughout. The interior galleries vary in size, and have been designed to have flexibility for exhibitions of different types and sizes. There are galleries with double height that allow large installations, while also providing a connection with the galleries on other floors. The gallery areas have access to gardens and terraces that serve as a cleansing atmosphere before entering another gallery space, providing the user with the opportunity to make their unique path to consume the art.
 

Renderings by WeDo.

Partners: Jorge Urias Garza, Margaret Inga Urías
Team: Hugo Santana, Cesar Valles
Location: Brooklyn, New York
Type: Mural
Status: Proposal
Year: 2017

The Past Is Always Present In The Future.
Employing the forgotten past to explore the ever-changing, transformative energy of the area surrounding 90 Flatbush Ave, this mural presents a timeline of its historical evolution from its early, still-uninhabited landscape, to the present and beyond, to tell the story of downtown Brooklyn’s continuous metamorphosis: from its naturally wild beginnings to an expanding megalopolis, it is a city that is continuously blooming and booming, with every era of its development holding the promise of spirited growth and change.

Layering three sections that each reference a specific snapshot in time, the mural is based on research completed of Flatbush Avenue and the immediate blocks surrounding it. The artwork reads like a cartographic detective tale; each part alluding to some aspect of this specific site’s past, present, and future: from its now mostly vanished plant life, to the lost farmlands of Pre-Revolution era “Brookland Parrish”, to the dynamic expansion of the city’s current and forthcoming buildings, spires and towers.

Team: Jorge Urias Garza, Alberto Carrillo, Hugo Santana
Location: Mexico City
Type: Competition
Year: 2016

A public fractalized triangular structure based on a series of pods that retain its scale organically. The Pavilion integrates to its environment through angular niches that frame views from historical buildings, and allows access to users by creating a semi-open walkable space. From pop-up shops to performance and art exhibits, the structure operates with an open agenda as a versatile living space. 

The pavilion's skin is made out of a structural pattern inspired in the motives of wrought iron that surround the site and resemble the colonial details found in the national historical context. These elements, which are traditionally portrayed as restrictive and insulating by delineating private from public space, are now reinterpreted as a perforated enclosure that in contrast, takes in and embraces the user. 

The pavilion is a playful, semi-translucent object with an ever changing phenomenon of projected lights and shadows, that invites the public to walk through it and feel it's experience from the inside.

Design: Jorge Urias Garza
Location: New York
Type: Illustration
Status: Completed
Year: 2015

We were invited by our friend Kitty Ramos creator of the Snowsuits non-profit initiative, to design a pair of Illustrations to be printed on handmade notebooks, whose proceeds will help unprivileged children of Juarez Mexico by providing snowsuits and coats for the winter season.

Our designs were silk-screened in gold and fluorescent ink over black and white 200 grs. thick paper. All notebooks were fabricated and sold at select spots in the city of Monterrey Mexico. 

Team: Fernando Romero, Sergio Rebelo, Jorge Urias Garza, Erdem Tüzün, Isaac Michan Daniel, Yelta Köm, Unai Artetxe, Antonia Wai, Sang-Uk Park, Chris Shelley
Collaborators: FR-EE, KOTUstudio, MAPmx
Client: Canakkale Governorship
Type: Competition
Location: Canakkale, Turkey
Status: 3rd Mention Prize

A city of rich history, where ancient battles of Gallipoli and Troy once played out, our proposal for the future Çanakkale Antenna Tower is a vertical extension of these ever present historical strata becoming Çanakkale’s new “Peak Point”.

The distinct 100m tower presents a novel type of public space, where unexpected domains come together, inviting the locals and visitors of the city inside. The structure progresses as a natural element from the landscape, merging the tower and park typologies to create more than 6,000m2 for observation, communication and culture.

The tower rigorously meets the technical requirements of being able to broadcast signals. Formally, the Antenna Tower presents a new approach to extending vertical program horizontally, creating a much larger domain for public engagement. The form of the tower is the negotiator between technical and public agendas. The engineering and technical agenda is achieved via the 35-meter antenna with no program at its pinnacle.

The base of the Antenna Tower forms a continuous public space that merges with the existing landscape, a place where technology and nature become integrated. The antenna structure has different deflection points that bend and distort the spiral.

A single surface wraps around the efficient antenna core with spaces for education and exhibits Open air spaces with interactive and non-active program offerings will gradually emerge and unfold from the moment the visitors enter the tower, including a timeline of historical events, art exhibits, performance canopies and platforms, benches with shaded areas for relaxation, as well as a 360-degree panoramic view of the city and landscape of Çanakkale, Turkey.

The design proposal aims to provide the city of Çanakkale with a new structure of multiple forms, readings and meanings. The visitor experience and performance of the tower is a priority, while keeping in mind that technology is ever-changing and staying flexible for the future requirements of broadcasting antennas. We believe that a project with this physical presence and significant investment must be conceived as one that meets the demands of today with ideas for sustaining in the future. Ultimately - a place that is open, captivating and egalitarian.

Team: Jorge Urias Garza, Michael Lightner, Jiacong Zeng, Cara Hyde-Basso
Location: Brooklyn, New York
Type: Installation
Status: Built
Year: 2013

Our design intent was to fill space with stackable enclosed voids, protruding from the wall. By using 3D voronoi “boulders” clustered around a proscribed arc we created a five foot cantilever. 2D voronoi patterns were used for the boulder faces, while zip tied and bolted connections enabled the necessary amount of tolerance and constructability. 

Design: Jorge Urias Garza
Location: Lower Manhattan, New York, NY
Type: Research - Design Thesis - Pratt Institute
Critic: Kutan Ayata
Year: 2013

Rehabilitating The Manhattan Office Tower.
We, being members of nature, have to rethink how we create the places we live in. This project intends to transform the existing office environment in Lower Manhattan by proposing a new kind of urbanity that responds to local site and building conditions through a relationship of shelter and social interactions inspired in nature.

The goal is to diversify the typical generic office tower by carving its structure open and populating the carved voids with a new aggregated structural system that operates as a generator of opportunities between the existing and the new structure, as well as reinforcing the relationships between the tower and the city.

“Why don’t rabbits burrow rectangular burrows? Why didn’t early man make rectangular caves?” (Archigram par. 1).

“…The box… has been, and remains; the basic element of architecture …The box is perhaps the single most practical invention of human thought. Considering that it appears nowhere in the visible scale of nature, it is also one of the purest and most abstract” (Woods par. 1).


 

Design: Jorge Urias Garza
Location: Border between Mexico and USA
Type: Research - Pratt Institute
Critic: Vito Acconci
Year: 2012

The project questions the idea of a political border that is set as an abstract line on a map to define different places, and explore the idea of an inhabitable Living Wall independent from both the United States and Mexico. It does not try to solve a political border issue; on the contrary, it raises questions on our current conception of stability, identity, and ownership provoking new possible scenarios. 

To understand the issue of the border between Mexico and the USA, we need to recognize that border cities need each other, as the coexistent co-dependency for better or worst will not disappear. This intervention performs as a landscape at the intersection of border cities, where an urban oasis is produced to benefit the border culture. Even though we share the same land, air, sun and water sources, the political differentiation is most evident at this area; the new Living Border Wall is made out of two structures supporting each other, inspired on patterns of farmlands from both sides of the border, suggesting the dualism where one city would not exist without the other.

Today the border operates as a one point crossing wall, our strategy is to grow the width of the wall and make it porous to produce space inside (a Poché) which does not belong to either countries. The project generates a new idea of how a border can be inhabited and crossed, as it acts as an urban buffer zone. Rather than conceiving the intervention as a sculptural wall we prefer to use it as an excuse to produce a performative space. 

This strategy can start to produce a new autonomous entity independent from both countries. Which ever effect this proposal generates on the future, it will be defined by local individuals interacting day to day without political policies, redefining the existing border culture.

Team: Jorge Urias Garza, Hugo Santana, Cesar Valles
Location: Human body
Type: Illustration / Installation
Status: Completed
Year: 2017

The client's petition was to include one of his family members initials “E” and “M” into a tattoo design that could be filled with personal meaning without being too literal. 
We opted for a graphical abstraction with a classic architectural approach that could surpass the barrier of time. A repetitive pattern of a double open arch, suggests both letters and repeats itself 4 times, one for each member of his family. 

Team: Jorge Urias Garza, Hugo Santana, Cesar Valles
Collaborators: Kitty Ramos
Location: Seoul, South Korea
Type: Ferry Terminal
Status: Competition
Year: 2017

For innumerable generations the man made interventions on the edge of the majestic Han River have isolated its natural beauty from the city, limiting this life giving artery to a mere navigable body of water. In an effort to reconcile the river and the city, we have crafted a proposal focusing on respect of the nature of both.

The main structure of the ferry terminal building, consists of a red iron structure of parallel sheets that creates a stable yet light exoskeleton, echoing naval and natural marine forms. The building lines are an extrapolation of the various contours of the Han River that are then cut and intersected by the projected axis from the city.

The project turns a formerly neglected area of the Yeoui-naru Park into ways to connect the shore of the Han River to the City trough interventions and the creation of the Yeoui-naru Ferry Terminal. The landscape forms a novel geography, an archipelago with organic forms that harmonically intertwines the Han River with the City, creating a new relationship between them, where a third zone is formed by transferring water to firm ground, recovering some of the wilderness of the river.

The islands are intervened to amplify existing situations and introduce new ways of engagement and also recover some forgotten desires of the area citizens; from taking a walk in the forest, getting in touch with the wild, direct contact with the water or simply escaping for the daily city routine, attaching different kinds of vegetation, inspired by traditional Korean gardens. 

Team: Jorge Urias Garza, Alberto Carrillo, Nancy Laredo
Location: Ciudad Juarez, Chih. Mexico
Status: Built
Year: 2013
Photography: Rafael Gamo & Jorge Urias Studio

Design: Jorge Urias Garza
Collaborators: Victor Martinez, Luis Mario Gutierrez
Location: Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
Type: Institutional Building
Client: ITESM Tec de Monterrey Campus Juarez
Status: Proposal
Year: 2009