Students participate in Inaugural Mexico City Study Away Program

August 13, 2026

BY rawad nahhas

100 Years, 100 Lives is an opportunity for our students to participate in a four-week research project aimed at redefining communal living spaces within complex urban environments in the context of Mexico City. This unique urban fabric allows 17 students to experience how architectural forms and urban planning have evolved over centuries, responding to cultural, political, and social shifts.

Mexico City spans pre-Hispanic civilizations through Spanish colonialism to contemporary urban complexity, a palimpsest that makes the city an ideal laboratory for understanding how architecture responds to radical social and environmental change. Rather than studying this layering from textbooks, students are embedded in it.

Led by Sergi Serrat and Eduardo Cadaval at the Laguna Factory, the studio focuses on adaptive reuse and collective housing typologies. The specific site is Zamora 15 in La Condesa, a neighborhood emblematic of Mexico City's current pressures: historic charm colliding with gentrification, obsolete structures amid climate crisis, and urgent questions about who gets to live in the city. Students are designing not generic housing but intentional communities, extended families, student collectives, urban manufacturers, vulnerable populations, each with distinct spatial and social needs.

For architecture student Justin Gonzalez, the experience crystallized something abstract into lived understanding. "In my brief time in Mexico City," he reflected, "I gained a deeper appreciation for both its culture and its architecture. The city provided an incredible opportunity to immerse myself in the energy of a major city and see how architectural responses differ fundamentally from what we know."

This is learning through proximity: not reading about Mexico City's crises, but designing within them.