Frida Escobedo

Frida Escobedo (b.1979, Mexico City) is principal and founder of an architecture and design studio based in Mexico City. The projects produced at the studio operate within a theoretical framework that addresses time, not as a historical calibration, but rather as a social operation. This approach is inspired by Henri Bergson’s notion of ‘social time,’ which proposes that understanding of ourselves and our environments depends first and foremost on duration. Escobedo’s conceptual works, such as the El Eco Pavilion (2010), Split Subject (2013) and Civic Stage (2013), have articulated these ideas by creating social spaces that can be inhabited and experienced in multiple ways, by individuals and groups, encouraging social time to unfold at different speeds.

The work developed at Frida Escobedo’s studio ranges from art installation and furniture design to residential and public buildings. The firm’s projects include: ‘You know you cannot see so well as by reflection,’ a summer Pavilion designed for the central courtyard of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2015); the exhibition design for ‘Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today,’ curated by Pablo León de la Barra and organised by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York in collaboration with the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo (2015-2016); and ‘A very short space of time through very short times of space’, an art installation commissioned by Stanford University (2016).

Whether working on public or private commissions, Escobedo aims to make use of disuse, to find significance in the interstices of our lived environment, to give equal attention to craft and to practicality. The intention to provide possibilities for growth and flexibility can be found as much in large scale social housing projects, such as those developed for INFONAVIT (2015-17), as in more modest interventions, like Casa Cruz Castillo (2012) or Casa Negra (2014).

Notable architectural projects include: La Tallera, the refurbishment and expansion of the home and studio of the seminal Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros (Cuernavaca, 2012); Librería Octavio Paz (Mexico City, 2013); and the renovation of the iconic 1950s Hotel Boca Chica (Acapulco, 2010). Recent projects from 2017 include: ‘If we want to continue,’ an intervention at the Neutra VDL Research House in Los Angeles; ‘No. 9,’ an exhibition at the Arthur Ross Gallery, Columbia University; and large-scale installations at the Chicago Architecture Biennial and la Biennale d'Architecture d'Orléans.

Escobedo is the recipient of the Architectural League of New York’s Young Architects Forum award (2009), the 2014 BIAU Prize, the 2016 Architectural Review Emerging Architecture Award and, most recently, the 2017 Architectural League Emerging Voices Award.

Escobedo has been a visiting professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (2015), Harvard Graduate School of Design (2016) and the Architectural Association of London (2016). In autumn 2017 she was named as the Howard A. Friedman Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.