Carlos H Matos' practice merges architecture and sculpture

portrait of architect Carlos H Matos and to the right, his project, the earthy house Casa Monte — Left, Carlos H Matos
Right, Casa Monte (Image credit: Left: Fabian Martinez. Right: Rory Gardiner)

As a child growing up in Mexico City, Carlos Matos often spent time at the home of his grandfather, architect Ernesto Gómez Gallardo, in the affluent district of San Jerónimo. Built in the late 1970s, the brutalist Casa Möbius was ‘distanced from the idea of comfort, slightly dysfunctional’, recalls Matos. ‘Even the bathrooms were triangular. It was absurd.’ Despite its peculiar layout, the house also offered ‘spaces for every kind of interaction’. It was a habitable provocation, prodding at what Matos calls ‘the boundaries between architecture and sculpture.’ That boundary – blurred, possibly obsolete – has been central to his practice ever since.

Meet Carlos H Matos, the experimental young Mexican architect

Matos’ work in Mexico City began in 2014, three years after he finished his degree at London’s Architectural Association (AA). That year, along with two of his colleagues, he started a visiting programme for the AA called Beton Machine, which was ‘all about experiments with concrete and monumental sculpture in Mexico,’ he says. For four years, they offered ‘a crash course’ on pre-Hispanic ruins, modernist abstraction, social-realist reliefs, and everything in between, from Juan O’Gorman and Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli Museum to an intensive study of Edward James’ surrealist garden in Xilitla.

Tenaza Havana_Cred. Lucas Cantu — Tenaza Havana

From 2016-2023, Matos explored those forms through Tezontle, a studio founded with Lucas Cantú. Together, they developed a singular language that was both organic and geometric, figurative and abstract, primitive and futuristic. Since parting ways with Cantú, Matos has continued to develop his own interests by applying the tactile materiality of architecture to his sculpture, and the ambiguity of art to his buildings. For Casa Monte, completed in 2024 on the Oaxacan coast, Matos used massive concrete blocks, cast in situ, to build a house like a half-ruined or half-built temple. His 2025 solo show at Mexico City gallery

Peana deployed resin, aluminium, concrete and steel in an elaborate tableau, equal parts builder’s workshop, petrified Zen garden and alien garage. Other recent projects include a temazcal (a pre-Hispanic sweat lodge) in upstate New York, and ongoing research for a forthcoming installation at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in LA.

Finest Hour in Arcadia_Cred. Rodrigo Chapa — Finest Hour in Arcadia

‘I’m always interested in where things are situated in time, the question of “when is this from”,’ says Matos, who prefers to think of ‘architecture as a stage’ – playful, theatrical and resonant. His buildings are not just for habitation. They are, like his grandfather’s house, ‘for every kind of interaction’ – indeterminate borderlands where, he says, ‘you can act out the tension between the future and the past’.

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