Since 1996, JSa has operated as a design studio focused on "reconverting, rehabilitating, restoring, compensating, reinserting, reoccupying, and reinhabiting" sites specifically located in the Roma and Condesa neighborhoods of Mexico City. Founded by Javier Sánchez, the studio aims for "architecture to link everyday life from the intimate space, adapting to urbanity and transforming it by weaving cities from their communal areas and the home, the epicenter and reason for existence of metropolises."
JSa currently has 39 completed residential projects of its own and 11 more in progress, representing a portfolio of just over 1,350 units across three Mexican cities. Throughout these 23 years of continuous work, JSa has operated alongside its namesake developer, which has now reached maturity and is transforming into a new project: AMBRA | Ar(t)chitectural Developer.
The project was presented through an exhibition showcasing the developer's work, including plans, conceptual models, diagrams, and historical photographs depicting the passage of time in Mexico City. Through this, AMBRA seeks to project its brand image in residential and commercial development, based on the principles that have guided them over these 23 years.
JSa is a design studio, unlike a factory whose gears and mass-produced goods are automatically arranged and systematized. Here, design processes are developed through strategies of otherness at an urban scale. Over more than two decades, the more than fifty completed architectural projects have revitalized neighborhoods, achieving a fundamental premise: rehabilitating pre-existence. Since 1996, the studio has built a vision of the city to be inhabited with collective ideals. This exhibition presents three complementary visions of JSa’s works in Mexico City. The simultaneous vision emphasizes collective space in urban cartographies, circulation and double-height spaces in cross sections, and the materiality of tectonic abstractions. The works included in the exhibition correspond to a dictionary of built forms and intentions that simultaneously constitute the collective imaginary of their insertion into the city.
- Juan José Kochen. Curator.
The exhibition will remain open at the Antiguo Edificio del Partido Popular Socialista, located at Av. Álvaro Obregón 185, Roma Nte., Cuauhtémoc, 06700 Mexico City, CDMX, from Tuesday to Sunday, from 1:00 PM to 8:00 PM.
This article was written by Mónica Arellano. The translation is powered by AI.
