An exhibition and installation located in Luis Barragán’s Jardin17

Memory Houses By Víctor Alcérreca

Robert Hutchison fills with collective memory and free associations these projects that occupy the site of a former family home on the eastern shore of Maryland. Each one references places seen, inhabited and memorized from around the world - churches, mosques, lighthouses. Ironically, Rob is the same architect who questions the obligation of History in the learning of architecture. There is no contradiction in this. If anything, a nuance: the history of architecture and its archetypes are not significant only as scholarly knowledge, as an encyclopedic accumulation of references, but until they resonate in our imagination. Aldo Rossi wrote it in his own way in his “Scientific Autobiography”: “I looked for it in history, it translated it into my story.”

We can affirm that Robert subscribes with his work the advice that Peter Zumthor gave to his students: “learn to work consciously with your personal and biographical experiences of architecture”. With the difference that these projects are built to house and provide a future to those experiences. Without tacitly drawing them, the inhabitants of the Memory Houses wander. They live in plots, in daily and extraordinary rituals, which the architect draws, in absence but with the same precision: the arrival of a funerary train, the launching in the water of a small boat, the daily navigation towards the lighthouse, the sound of the bell tower. Robert and his team draw architecture to build, with vital urgency and from a fertile collection of memories, an essay on what defines us as human beings: to evoke lovingly and beyond architecture.

Project by Robert Hutchison Architecture
Exhibition Design: Robert Hutchison, Sharon Fung, Xiaoxi Jiao
Exhibition Curator: Salvador Macias, Principal, Estudio Macias Peredo, Guadalajara
Assistant Curator: Alejandra Rodriguez, Estudio Macias Peredo, Guadalajara
Slipcast Ceramic Sculptures fabricated by Ceramica Suro, Guadalajara
Jardin17 Luis Barragán, Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City, MX, Exhibited August 10th - September 30th, 2019
Photography by Cesar Bejar Photography
The exhibition included an installation on the rooftop of the studio entitled ‘Chapel for Luis Barragan’