On August 28, the exhibition “Arquitectura Popular del Noreste” (Vernacular Architecture of the Northeast) opened at the Distrito Tec Open Gallery in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. The show features a series of images of the region's vernacular architecture captured by a group of 16 photographers, alongside residential surveys conducted by two architects: Francisco Álvarez, Tania Anchondo, Marcelo Barahona, Marcel del Castillo, Colectivo El Norestense, Sofía Garfias, Nora I. Gómez, Sofía Kalionchiz, José V. Kontos, Iván Manríquez, Josué Olivo, Isaac Rincón Aiza, Jar Rock, Carolina Segura, Martín Tovar, Marcela Vela, David Verazaluce Lugo, and Ignacio Woolfolk.
The twenty large-format panels feature a selection from the documentation carried out in 2018 and 2019 by an interdisciplinary team led by anthropologist Pablo Landa Ruiloba and geographer Camilo Contreras Delgado. This survey focuses on rural housing in the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas, highlighting the cultural practices of their inhabitants. The project stems from the question: What do we discover when we focus our gaze on the wooden, stone, and adobe houses in the forests and deserts of northeastern Mexico?
The exhibited materials were selected from nearly 15,000 images that currently make up the Arquitectura Popular collection at the Fototeca Nuevo León of CONARTE. These archives are currently being cataloged and will soon be open to students and researchers, fulfilling one of the project's primary goals: to disseminate knowledge that fosters new research.
The exhibition Popular Architecture of the Northeast shares this objective and is linked to another: revealing the region's cultural richness to the general public. Northern Mexico is generally described as an urban and industrial area. It is also, however, a region with a great diversity of architectural typologies, construction techniques, and ways of living that manifest in rural areas. The images in the exhibition reveal some of the ways in which this diversity has emerged alongside productive, migratory, and social processes.
The Distrito Tec Open Gallery opened in 2019 as part of an arts initiative that also includes public murals and building interventions across the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Monterrey campus. Arquitectura Popular del Noreste is the third exhibition presented in this space. Additional images and information about the project can be found on Instagram (@arqpopulardelnoreste) and Facebook (Arquitectura Popular del Noreste).
This article was written by ArchDaily Team. The translation is powered by AI.
