Garden Wall” is the winning entry of Arquine’s 24th international competition for the Mextrópoli pavilion in 2022. The pavilion explores the meaning of a post-extractivist architecture focused on nurture and care. It’s composed of three clusters of plants laid out in “islands” built temporarily with recycled wooden planks and filled with leaf litter. The materials perform as a carbon sink, reducing the pavilion’s carbon footprint. Once concluded, plants were donated in a gesture following the “ethics of gift giving.”
The plant selection seeks to reproduce a botanical microcosm of Mexico City according to the landscape history of the valley as observed through its picturesque tradition. A statue of Alexander von Humboldt, a German geographer and proto ecologist who famously studied the geography and botany of Mexico in the nineteenth century, is absorbed within the pavilion as a homage.
The interior is a compact labyrinth with three access points hidden from each other. The inner chambers, designed considering lines of sight and paths, are places for public intimacy and re-enchantment. The pavilion, as a situated installation, unrepeatable elsewhere, alludes to all senses, history, and symbolism through its scents (jasmine hidden among the plants), sounds (leaf litter under our feet), textures (of decaying wood), microclimates (from evapotranspiration), and narrative (of Humboldt, plants, and gardens). Curved forms hide the exits, while the height of plants along the perimeter erase the pavilion’s limits creating the illusion of extending it through the entire Alameda.