Yucatan: First semester work

Architecture and Extreme Environments fieldwork Exhibition. Opens 26th of January at 3 pm.

Aiming to engage with many of Yucatán’s environmental challenges through architectural exercises, twenty-eight students travelled to the peninsula in the south-east of Mexico during the winter of 2025 to test their own constructions and prototypes. Working in collaboration with local communities, experts and institutions, and with the support of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, the students undertook a month-long period of fieldwork. 

From the city of Mérida to coastal towns and small communities in rural regions, students collaborated with local residents, scientists, research centres and universities to explore and test the performance of their proposals. These experiments addressed challenges such as cleaning polluted air, developing new local building materials, responding to the impacts of climate change and reducing unsustainable energy dependency, among many others. Students systematically measured performance and explored artistic practices to study the potential of their projects while engaging with local know-how and reflecting on the role of architecture in society through a process of site-specific design in territories out of balance. 

These field studies form the first semester of work and serve as a step toward proposing a building design to be developed during the second semester, grounded in presence and local collaboration.