CC Arquitectos

Straight from Mexico, this week we bring to you the work and thinking of Manuel Cervantes Cespedes, the founder of CC Arquitectos. Creating works from the people and for the people, his approach brings a vernacular and a regional touch to contemporary architecture, helping define a modern day Mexico that embraces its own culture and history.

— Office —

We started with the idea of having a small office with good clients. We don’t have a lot of clients, we’ve got good clients. I always try to work with the same clients in different kind of projects, because like Mies Van der Rohe once said, behind a great project there’s a great client. And that’s how we started, with small projects but with huge clients, and the idea was to climb with this huge clients.

— Approach —

We approach with the same philosophy but it’s never the same real approach because we work on very different fields. We work from the private sector to the public sector, and obviously the approach is different. But I think that we have two pillars, the first one is the site and the second one is the people of the site.
I can say that our approach is people and the site.
At the end of the day I think that architecture is just a process between people and places, I don’t consider my work as the artist work. I think that I’m more like a technician trying to solve relationships between people and sites.

— Start —

Gathering all that information from the approach to the site I start creating a script like in a movie, that it’s going to create the place for a person, for a family, for a community. And I think that approach of a canvas, involving all those things and the people, is the first draft to start imagining things.

— Mexico —

I always try to get the good part of our system, of our society and I always try to work understanding that we are like that. I always mention this example because, I think that the world it looks like México and it doesn’t look like Paris, so in our office we are trying to find ways, solutions for countries like México. Because again, I understand we are not a perfect society, we are not a perfect economy, we’ve got a lot of problems but I try to deal with those problems. I always try to find a better way to our society with all the problems that we got.

— Material —

My favourite material is the one that I can find or discover on a culture or in a site, or in a region. A lot of people talk about a regional architecture in my work, and I like that because again, I think that architecture is the result of a place.

— Influences —

For me the biggest influence is always the vernacular architecture. Sometimes you don’t have the vernacular architecture, but the biggest influence then is the context.
The second one is the landscape. I think that vegetation, landscape and all the natural environment you can find in a place it’s a huge influence…Like regional architecture, I can’t imagine a piece of work in contrast with the site, I think that if you blend your architecture in the site you’re creating good architecture.
The third biggest influence are architects, I love to visit architecture from another architects. I love the work of Louis Kahn, I love the work of Renzo Piano and I love the work of Peter Zumthor.