Location: Bosque de Chapultepec, Mexico City
Type: Park and Auditorium, Rehearsal, Cafeteria Pavilions
Size: Park 70,000 sqm / 7 hectares / 17 acres
Auditorium Pavilion 1,120 sqm/ 12,055 sqft,
Rehearsal Pavilion 560 sqm/ 6,027 sqft
Cafeteria Pavilion 375 sqm/ 4,036 sqft
Status: Built, 2024; Competition First Prize, 2022; Groundbreaking, 2023
Team:
Michan Architecture/ Isaac Michan Daniel, Alexandra Bové, Narciso Martinez, Fernando Gomez, Juan Pablo Salas, Indira Fernández, Fernando Alamilla, Jose Perez, Sonia Mendez, Ximena Ibarra, Ricardo Marentes, Gerardo Guevara 
Parabase/ Carla Ferrando Costansa, Pablo Garrido Arnaiz
Landscape: Taller de Paisaje/ Entorno Tonatiuh Martínez, Alejandra Aguirre, Karen Michelle, Alexa Martinez, Miranda Elizabeth Inman, Gisela Reyna Miranda, Zaid Puente, Theo Cozzi, Perla Flores, Gustavo Adolfo Huelva
Landscape Engineering: Taller de Ingenieria y Diseño/ Juan Ansberto Cruz, Javier Garcia
Theater Consultancy: Theater Projects/ Jules Lauve, Scott Crossfield
diseñOteatral/ Itzel Alba
Acoustic Consulting: Sound Arts/ Cristian Ezcurdia, Jaume Soler
Structural Engineer: Inesco/ Luis Perez 
MEP: Sinergia Arquitectura Integral/ Francisco Olivares
Photos: Arturo Arrieta,  Drone: Jonathan A Santiago

Initiated in 2021 and built in 2024, C294 Apartments is a residential adaptive reuse project located in Condesa, CDMX. The project consists of 5 apartments: one per floor and a lobby with a parking garage on the ground floor. There are 2-bedroom apartments on floors one through four, and a 1-bedroom penthouse on the top floor with a setback and terrace offering 360-degree views.

It is an intervention of an existing damaged building comprised of reinforced concrete columns and slab construction from 1953. As both design and executive architect, Michan Architecture together with the local structural engineer (CTC Ingenieros Civiles) repaired and unified the original structure with a new contemporary design while reconfiguring the interior and apartment layouts to accommodate current needs.

C294 Apartments’ silhouette and balconies take inspiration from the well-maintained Art Deco buildings common to Condesa, a popular and happening area known for creativity. Michan Architecture reinterpreted the beautiful motifs as a play of straight lines and tangential curves to add internal walls, balconies, parapets, and planters.

Hidden under stucco at the start of the project, the design utilizes the original cast-in-situ concrete slabs with inverted beams to connect new and preexisting. The new additions to reinvent the building use wood striped formwork to blur the boundaries between old and new, creating areas for a landscape that gives the building more biophilia, dressing it in green living plants and promoting health benefits from integrating nature.

“The project questions notions of preservation as the new building does not try to preserve the original appearance but rather reuse something that was hidden: the concrete slabs once covered in stucco with an addition that matches and creates a new dialogue for adapting and transforming structures of value in Mexico City and beyond.” — Michan Architecture

Location: Campeche 294, Condesa, Mexico City
Type: Adaptive Re-Use, Apartment Building, 5 units (6 stories), ground-level parking
Structure: Fair-faced reinforced concrete
Size: 1190 sqm / 12809.05 sft
Status: Built, 2024; Started 2021; Groundbreaking 2022
Team: Fernando Gomez, Fernando Alamilla, Benjamin Caballero, Pilar Colado, Alexandra Bové, Isaac Michan Daniel
Collaborator: Tarek Gutierrez
Photos: Arturo Arrieta

A box on the outside.
When entering the space, the box has a completely different logic and becomes a subtraction of an inverted vault.
A concavity is presented within a continuous surface without roof.
An oasis within the chaotic historic city center.

The pavilion ( ) was design as a mute space on the outside but with an intriguing contradiction on its inside.
The project is part of MEXTRÓPOLI 2018, the largest architecture forum in Latin America where there are pavilions, workshops and lectures. The pavilion was located the Alameda Central, in the Historic Center of Mexico City and had a short life of four days.

The project is located on a rectangular plot with its short side facing the street, in an area with a high demand for social housing in Mexico City. The 42 units are placed in three towers, generating interior courtyards for views and natural ventilation to each apartment; the towers are connected with two vertical cores and bridges above the patios.

The structure on the parking floor is made of reinforced concrete, transferring the loads to masonry brick walls on the five levels above. The masonry brick walls play an important role on the project as they are part of the structure and reinterpret the traditional brick wall, blurring the boundary between structure and ornament.

With the use of a single unit—red mud artisanal brick—we were able to produce a heterogeneous coherence in the facades, creating walls that respond to shadows and light. The constraints of the project such as budget, materials, structure and density were seen as opportunities, which with a few mutations form the traditional construction techniques generated new spatial qualities that respond to the local aesthetic, producing new alternatives and relations between technology and tradition.

Location: Mexico City
Structure: Masonry brick with reinforced concrete frames   
Type: Housing
Team: Isaac Michan Daniel, Salomon Cohen, Eduardo Lorenzana
Status: Built
Year: 2012
Size: 3,650 sqm 
Photos: Rafael Gamo                 

This project is for a mid-market residential building in Mexico City, consisting of seven 1-2 bedroom apartments with parking in the basement. It was decided early on that the construction system would be cast-place-concrete, that the unit types would be simple and straight forward, and that the building would maximize its site footprint and allowed height. These were constraints that satisfied the client’s desires and simultaneously allowed us to focus our efforts on an interesting opportunity in the project, the apertures.
The site strategy drove the two side elevations toward the lot lines, making more standard windows undesirable. In order to allow light, view, and ventilation to all sides of the building, a scheme was developed to manipulate the windows into something familiar yet subtly strange. The rectangular windows are rotated into the building’s facade, resulting in two ruled surfaces at the top and bottom and transforming the window into an inverted trapezoidal bay. As the windows rotate in, the slabs appear to pull at the head and sill. This results in a facade that is both extremely blunt in its flatness and is also a dynamic bas-relief of smooth undulating shadows. These windows also produced different interior moments as the shifting facade met the standardized unit layout. Views out from the interior became small events of forced oblique perspective as one looked both out and down the street at the same time making each unit unique as it approached the enclosure.
The design process for the apertures was guided by both iterative digital models and research into the history of cast concrete ruled surfaces in the architecture of Latin America. A number of full-scale mock-ups allowed us to find a tectonic articulation that used board formed concrete as an integral expression of the aperture concept. The final methodology used traditional construction techniques combined with re-usable fiberglass casting modules to produce an alternative expression between digital technology and traditions of construction.

Location: Mexico City
Structure: Fair-faced reinforced concrete
Type: Apartment Building
Team: Isaac Michan Daniel, Narciso Martinez, Omar Acevedo, Jorge Sanchez
Status: Built
Size: 960 sqm
Year: 2020
Photos: Rafael Gamo, Alexandra Bové, Rafael Buzali