Las Pozas in Xilitla, Mexico, is one of the most extraordinary architectural landscapes of the twentieth century — a surrealist garden interlaced within the Sierra Huasteca jungle, imagined and built by the English eccentric Edward James beginning in 1962, after a frost killed the thousands of orchids he had spent years collecting. What replaced them was stranger and more durable: a proliferation of concrete follies, stairways to nowhere, columns without ceilings, arches framing only sky, and the jungle that surrounds it all. A radical conception of the type that would have made Piranesi proud.

Xilitla offers a new way of thinking about architecture and its relationship to nature. As opposed to the more defensive posture of fighting against nature that has characterized much of the last century, simply keeping it at bay, we are here confronted with an extraordinarily unique context that offers a symbiotic relation between the two. Las Pozas offers an architecture becoming part of larger processes of transformations — oxidation, weathering, biological growth, and erosion. Moss, rust, and wear are not accidents to be prevented; they are anticipated agents in the design and life of its structures. Its meaning depends on the tropical cloud forest, the liquidity of the atmosphere, the density of vegetation, the steep topography, the waterfalls and pools, the constant cycle of growth and decay. Architecture here is inseparable from the ecological forces acting upon it.

Here we understand how nature speaks. And this context, too, presents an equally rare opportunity to understand how architecture is made. The structures of Las Pozas were cast using handcrafted timber formwork, fabricated by local carpenters with a precision and inventiveness that the finished concrete only partially reveals. These molds are, in a precise sense, the hidden architecture behind the architecture. And they survive. Dispersed across Xilitla in bars, workshops, sheds, private homes, and storage yards. Architecture rarely turns its gaze toward its own instruments of production — the scaffolding, the formwork, the jig, the mold. These are treated as temporary, subordinate, expendable.

This studio begins with two questions. How can architecture exhibit the process of its own making? And how can it do so within an environment where building and nature are not opposed but choreographed?

After a research trip to Mexico, visiting Mexico City, Las Pozas, and the site itself, the studio proposes designing a new cultural institution for Xilitla: a Museum of Formwork. The program will encompass galleries for original formworks, today scattered seemingly at random across the town, new conservation and restoration facilities, research and archive spaces, educational workshops for local craftsmen, and artist and researcher residencies. Equally important will be the landscape and gathering spaces that engage the town beyond the boundaries of Las Pozas itself. Students will be challenged to rethink the museum typology from first principles — to imagine architecture that reveals how it is made, that anticipates how it will change, and that treats process, in both senses, as content.
 

Note regarding the Fall 2026 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Wednesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This studio will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 8th.