NEW YORK.- The Center for Architecture presents Mexico City Dialogues: New Architectural Practices, on view through May 7. The work of twelve exciting young architecture firms from Mexico City is the focus of the exhibition Mexico City Dialogues: New Architectural Practices, presented by the Center for Architecture. On view are fourteen fresh projects, two of them still in development and the rest completed within the past year and a half. Also on display is contextual information—diagrams, photographs, aerial images, texts—to suggest how the challenging realities of Mexico City shape the work of these architects.

If the 20th century began with the modern metropolis it certainly ended with the emergence of megacities. Recent voices have a renewed interest in the way these cities inform and shape cultural and professional attitudes, methods of work and design decisions. In a global world, cities are the economic engines and places where culture and ideas flourish: the social and physical condensation that becomes the raw material architects operate with every day.

With more than 18 million inhabitants and 80% of its area developed without the professional intervention of architects, city planners or public agencies, Mexico City presents an interesting condition for architects. Its overwhelming statistics, teeming population, insecurity, pollution and absence of coordinated urban planning create a series of spaces and opportunities for architects to negotiate, engage, and establish a dialogue with the city. This dialogue is an open relationship, different from a discourse relying exclusively on internal coherence and disciplinary autonomy.

Specific urban conditions permeate modes of working, shape architectures and open up potential by accepting contingencies rather than negating or concealing them. While some of these contingencies are shared with many cities, others remain specific: changing demographics addressed through new typologies; legal ambiguities overcome through creative interpretation of a weak code; economic inconsistencies inducing new modalities of finance; and ineffective planning addressed through pragmatic and discreet forms of urbanism – all forms of negotiation and strategies of engagement that align, organize, subvert or resist the conditions they face.