Mexico's Office of Urban Resilience creates projects that cities can learn from

Current members of Office of Urban Resilience, Elena Tudela, Victor Rico and Adriana Chávez, were working toward their master’s degrees at the Harvard Graduate School of Design when they heard about an open call from the Rockefeller Foundation for a project called 100 Resilient Cities. Raised in Mexico City, the trio immediately thought of their geologically unstable hometown as a perfect candidate for funding a comprehensive resiliency strategy.

Meet Office of Urban Resilience (ORU) from Mexico City

They approached the city government about applying, pulling together a complex diagnostic mapping of its urban footprint over flashpoints of environmental risk and centuries of lacustrine history. The foundation selected the Mexican capital as one of its first 30 cities and, soon after, the city itself created a Resiliency Agency – ‘one of the few cities that institutionalised the programme,’ says Chávez.

Returning home around 2014, the three designers found jobs – Tudela in academia, Rico in the city’s public works department, Chávez in the Resiliency Agency she had helped create – while developing Office of Urban Resilience (ORU) on the side (alongside Chávez’s brother Guillermo). That first project had offered invaluable lessons in ‘putting yourself on the table and positioning yourself to say, “This is what’s missing”,’ says Tudela. ORU’s posture has always been ‘that architecture should be more than designing objects,’ adds Rico. ‘It can be a tool for generating knowledge.’

For their first few years, Tudela recalls, ‘people would say to us, “you’re not designers, you’re consultants”.’ Then, in 2020, ORU completed a pair of projects in the floodprone margins of Cabo San Lucas, in Baja California Sur, for the Secretariat of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development.

Unassuming, cheap to build and easy to maintain, the projects doubled as civic infrastructure and public space, mitigating heat and managing water while providing shelters for future disaster relief. ORU had proven that its research-based approach could indeed produce worthy buildings.

In the years since, ORU has worked with a staggering array of government agencies, NGOs, universities, museums and enterprises to develop temporary pavilions, parks and territorial analyses. ‘It’s not easy for a studio to work with these organisms and understand their dynamics,’ says Adriana Chávez, but ORU has become a nimble intermediary. This work, Rico says, provides ‘mechanisms for making informed decisions’. That ambition sounds modest compared to the society-shaping goals of modernism, but ORU doesn’t see it that way. ‘We need to think at the scale of shade, a roof, a community,’ says Tudela. ‘The city can learn from projects that work.’

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