Productora wins 2016 MCHAP.emerge Award with Pavilion on the Zocalo

Productora won the MCHAP.emerge Award for the Pavilion on the Zocalo, a triangular temporary outdoor structure that represented Mexico City during the 2014 Culture Fair. As part of the Illinois Institute of Technology's biennial Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, MCHAP.emerge Award is an honorable shout-out to all the hard-working emerging architecture practices based in the Americas.

The MCHAP.emerge competition started out with 55 nominated projects that were built in the Americas region between January 2014 and December 2015. Five projects then made the cut as finalists. The finalist designers publicly presented their projects in front of the competition jury, IIT Architecture faculty and students, and the larger Chicago design community. The Pavilion on the Zocalo scooped the winning title during the MCHAP.emerge Symposium and Award Dinner that took place last Friday at S.R. Crown Hall.

During the ceremony, Productora co-founder Wonne Ickx received the MCHAP.emerge Award on behalf of the winning team. The grand-prize package includes the MCHAP Research Professorship in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology for the 2016/17 academic year, and funding of up to US$25,000 in support of research and publication contributing to IIT Architecture's current academic theme “Rethinking Metropolis.”

Read on for more about the winning project.

Representing host city Mexico City during the 2014 Culture Fair, the Pavilion on Zocalo addresses the history of migrations that significantly influenced the development of Mexico City, the Productora team describes.

"The architectonical expression of these migration flows is represented through a large boardwalk that brings visitors up to a balcony overlooking the main square (Zocalo) and that comes down again to stage a symbolical arrival to the center of the city," the team writes in their project statement.

"This game of straight and curved ramps, balconies and walkways, wraps around an equilateral triangle that houses a small exhibition curated by Alberto Odériz. As a reference to the ships that brought the first migrants to Mexico, the whole pavilion is made out of wood."

"The column-less interior space is covered by a large roof composed out of smaller triangular segments which lead the vertical forces down to the structural facades. The whole pavilion was pre-fabricated of site to be mounted in just 8 days on the main square."

Project credits:

Architecture: PRODUCTORA (Carlos Bedoya, Víctor Jaime, Wonne Ickx, Abel Perles)
Collaborators: Diego Escamilla, Lucrecia Sodo, Gerardo Aguilar | Contractor: Factor Eficiencia (Fermín Espinoza)
Structural Engineering: KALTIA | Museography: Alberto Odériz | Photography: Luis Gallardo – LGM Studio
Location: Zocalo, Mexico City
Type: Temporary Pavilion
Build surface: 90m2 covered (triangle), 150m2 (boardwalk)
Date: May 2014 (from May 17 to June 1) | An initiative from the Coordinación de Asuntos Internacionales GDF (Tatiana Alcázar) for the Culture Fair 2014 – CDMX | Support by MASISA and PIRWI.

You can also find project drawings of the pavilion in the image gallery right below.