Article source: Francisco Pardo Arquitecto + Amezcua
Designed by Francisco Pardo Arquitecto, in collaboration with architect Julio Amezcua, Milán 44 is an urban-regeneration project located in Colonia Juarez, Mexico City. The project transforms an old four-storey warehouse that was originally home to an auto-parts store into an urban market that reactivates a neighborhood, which connects two entirely contrasting areas. On one side, the booming business district that lines the emblematic Paseo de la Reforma, and on the other side, the lively epicenter of hipster subculture, Colonia Roma Norte. This area, which has been in decay since the 1985 earthquake, is currently experiencing a slow gentrification process. Centrally located and rich in history, it has been equipped with new infrastructure and now holds the genetic code for the city’s future development.
As its name — which reflects its exact address — would suggest, Havre 77 by Francisco Pardo Arquitecto in collaboration with architect Julio Amezcua is an urban re-densification and reactivation project that sinks its roots deeply into Mexico City’s urban fabric. Standing on the south side of the emblematic Paseo de la Reforma, the intervention is part of a wider regeneration program covering Colonia Juárez. Today a bustling central district, the area used to be one of the city’s most exclusive suburbs back in the early 1900’s, before it was hit by a revolutionary war and two destructive earthquakes in 1957 and 1985, which led to a rent freeze for over 50 years.
English writer Thomas Quincy talked in his classic (Confessions of an English opium-eater) of the pleasure that, after making sure all possible victims and risk were absent, a burning building can provide, one century after, Austrian pyromaniacs of Coop-himelblau used fire as a material in their firsts architectural interventions and Swiss French Bernard Tschumi theorized, radical, an architecture that produced a pyrotechnical pleasure so useful, he stated, as lighting matches.
Image Courtesy Fito Pardo
Architects: AT 103 – Julio Amezcua, Francisco Pardo
Project: Ave Fenix Fire Station
Location: Colonia Juarez, Mexico City, Mexico
Team: Tiberio Wallentin, Jorge Vázquez, Margarita Flores, Daniel Ramírez
email
Facebook
Twitter
RSS Feed
