Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao is the featured Harnar Award Lecturer

According to a UNM press release, Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao is the 2016 Jeff Harnar Award Lecturer, presenting “Working for People” on Friday, March 4.

The lecture will follow a presentation of the Harnar Award for Contemporary Architecture, according to the release. The event will start at 5:30 p.m. in the UNM School of Architecture and Planning’s Garcia Honda Auditorium and is free and open to the public.

Tatiana Bilbao has been practicing architecture since 1996, according to the press release, and in 1999 she established Laboratorio de la Ciudad de Mexico, one of the country’s first contemporary architecture firms.

According to the release, her firm, Tatiana Bilbao SC, was launched in 2004 and she has since worked in Mexico as well as in China, Belgium, Spain, France and Switzerland.

Bilbao brings a conviction that her work should engage with the social, political and economic conditions at play, wherever the project, according to the press release. At the 2015 Chicago Biennial, she presented her urban minimum housing prototype, a low-cost, expandable and adaptable house that was informed by over 2,000 interviews with prospective residents.

According to the press release, her work has included various programs, such as private residences, a botanical garden, social housing, a university research institute and even an ‘open chapel’ constructed as part of a restoration of a pilgrimage route near Guadalajara.

In her career, Bilbao has worked with artists Ai Weiwei and Gabriel Orozco in addition to architects such as Herzog & de Meuron, according to the release.

“More analog than digital, Bilbao’s intuitive sense of materiality is rooted in her process, one that favors physical models over computer-driven design, scissors over algorithms,” the press release stated. “She has built with steel and concrete, and also wooden pallets and rammed earth. Each material is chosen not simply for reasons of experimentation or appearance, but also in consideration of what is available locally and what the labor force is capable of."