Right, Casa Ma
In 2023, the directors of Arca Tierra, an organic farm in southern Mexico City, approached Sana Frini and Jachen Schleich to design a space for their new restaurant Baldío that would reflect their zero-waste ethos. Frini and Schleich were thrilled. Over the previous three years, the architects had built their practice, Locus, around what Frini calls ‘eco-localism, which isn’t ‘ecological’, exactly, but comes from the ecosystem you’re in’ – environmental, but also material, creative and social.
Meet Locus, the Mexican architects challenging the status quo
Collaborating with local design firms, Locus incorporated scrap wood into seating and made terrazzo-like floors by mixing organic waste from Arca’s farms into a light matrix of concrete. ‘We applied the knowledge we have,’ Frini explains. ‘What excites us for the future? To adapt that knowledge to different scales.’
Born into peripheries (Frini in Tunis, at the northern tip of the African continent, Schleich into Switzerland’s tiny Romansh-speaking minority), Locus’ founders come by their adaptability naturally. Schleich first came to Mexico in 2006 when a friend invited him to work on a short-term set design project.
Frini arrived a decade later, in 2016, after a visit to the Mexican pavilion at that year’s Venice Biennial. After several years working at the same firm, Schleich and Frini started to collaborate on various projects, even as they took on other jobs – Frini as a visiting critic at Cornell University, Schleich for a Swiss-funded initiative connecting architects with regional sustainable design experts.
Since its founding in 2020, Locus has grown quickly. Frini and Schleich have completed a sprawling timber structure in Mexico City’s newly opened Lake Texcoco Ecological Park, and co-curated the 2025 Versailles Biennale while also participating in a collective installation at the Mexican Pavilion in Venice. Current projects include houses in Mexico and Switzerland, a hotel and an ambitious educational complex, both in the Yucatán Peninsula. All draw on vernacular logics such as cross-ventilation and courtyards to achieve climate resiliency.
Though linked by their formal clarity, Locus’ projects share an attitude rather than an obvious visual language. ‘If you lose track of what makes a space habitable, you generate images that become a ‘style’,’ says Schleich, which, in turn, generate shallow responses to deep ecological problems. Shifting paradigms in climate and geopolitics are now forcing a worldwide return to local technologies. ‘Doors are closing,’ observes Frini. Which means that windows must be opening – to alternative ways of thinking and building. ‘Jachen and I both believe that beauty comes through necessity,’ Frini says.
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