The Félix Candela Award is a two-stage international architectural ideas competition conducted in Spanish. Organized annually by the Spanish Institute of Architecture (IESARQ), it is open to students of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and design, as well as young architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and designers, participating individually or in teams of two to three members.
What if Mexico City could no longer expand, or even had to contract? This edition of the Félix Candela Award poses several questions regarding the growth and evolution of the city in the Americas, specifically focusing on Mexico City—one of the largest metropolises in the Americas throughout its history. It also invites a reflection on property boundaries and their use usque ad sideras usque ad ínferos (from the heavens to the depths). Fundamentally, this concerns those boundaries established by law, yet the focus is not on the limits of vertical speculative development, but rather on the social conquest of the air as a right, superseding previous constraints. At the same time, it offers an opportunity to think pragmatically about the actual degrowth of our cities—in this case, Mexico City—the clearing of land, and the conquest of the air as an aspiration, a right, and an opportunity. The conceptual axis for this exercise could be defined by the variable-height strip that determines the ground and the horizon, where the current city exists, extended to the limits of our rational capacity to imagine it organized. Through the participants' proposals, this could be transformed into a free, continuous, permeable, and fundamentally pedestrian strip for citizens to reconnect with the nature of the ground.
