Welcome to the Archello Podcast, architecture’s most visual podcast series. Listen as Archello's Paris-based Editor in Chief, Collin Anderson, sits down with architects to discuss their careers and projects. Each audio episode is accompanied by a rich visual storyboard which listeners can use to follow the discussion.
Introducing Gabriela Carrillo
In this episode, Archello connects with Mexican architect Gabriela Carrillo, founder of Taller Gabriela Carrillo as well as Colectivo C733. Known for her deeply collaborative and socially engaged architecture, Carrillo has created impactful public projects across Mexico. She recently won the 2024 OBEL Award for the ambitious "36 Projects in 36 Months" initiative, which redefines how architecture can serve communities quickly and effectively.
Listen and scroll as Carrillo touches on her design philosophy, material strategies, teaching, and her most meaningful projects shaping public architecture in Mexico.
On geometry, lightness, and material expression
Gabriela Carrillo leads a Mexico City–based practice focused on private commissions, where she explores material expression and spatial clarity, while also co-directing a collaborative collective dedicated to fast-paced, community-centered public architecture.
Carrillo discusses her architectural forms—clear geometries that appear light and fragmented, revealing their structure while maintaining spatial coherence. She speaks to the influence of topography and pre-Hispanic architecture in shaping her spatial interventions, noting that lightness isn’t only structural but also conceptual—a response to place, budget, and time.
She explains that her pursuit of lightness stems partly from the practical demands of public projects. "Lightness is something that I pursue in my work," she says, especially in collective projects where speed and budget are critical. While private commissions allow for slower, heavier materials like stone or cast concrete, public projects often require hybrid strategies: "Light structures need heavy foundations."
On sustainability as common sense
Sustainability, Carrillo argues, should no longer be treated as a special category of architecture. "Unfortunately, we still have these objectives: social architecture, sustainable architecture," she says. "We need to take them away because those issues should be attached to any type of work that we do."
For Carrillo, local materials are key—not just for environmental reasons, but for economic and social ones. They lower costs, support local labor, and honor regional knowledge. She describes a project in Ensenada, Baja California, where she carefully avoided disturbing century-old desert shrubs. "Construction is something very powerful, something very strong for a territory," she says. In that case, she designed a house as a floating graft: light, minimal, and respectful of the terrain.
“We always thought richness was something far away. But maybe richness is already there—materials, knowledge, vegetation—all waiting to be used with care.”
Sustainability, she says, often returns to the basics: wind, sun, shade, and the rhythms of the site. "This environmental or sustainable approach sometimes just has to do with common sense."
On being Mexican: crisis and creativity
Asked about the influence of growing up in Mexico, Carrillo calls it a privilege. Diversity—geographical, cultural, social—is a major creative force. From deserts to jungles, indigenous traditions to hybrid cities, the country offers endless lessons in how to build with what is at hand. Carrillo draws inspiration from pre-Hispanic spaces and the Mayan invention of zero. "Space doesn't have to do with building square meters," she says. "It can happen only doing a void where it didn't exist before."
She also speaks candidly about the crises shaping Mexican architecture: poverty, migration, violence, flooding, seismic activity, and water scarcity. "When you're designing a cultural center, maybe this community doesn't need a cultural center," she reflects. "They need a well."
On a collective approach to public work
Carrillo divides her time between her private practice and a collective Colectivo C733 that focuses on public architecture. The collective was formed during a government-backed competition to design a market in Matamoros. Carrillo and her collaborators were tasked with designing and building small-scale civic infrastructure in just six months. From the start, they embraced a strategic mindset: part masonry, part light structure, always adapted to the site. "We are five partners. We vote, and that's it. We are really democratic," she says.
By collaborating across firms—each with different skills—they created a resilient model capable of fast, thoughtful execution. Their first successful project led to a national program “36 Projects in 36 Months”, a public architecture initiative in which the team designed and built civic infrastructure across Mexico’s most vulnerable regions—markets, community centers, medical facilities, and public plazas—over just three years. Rather than replicating a single prototype, the team developed a flexible, site-sensitive strategy using local materials and adaptable geometries, allowing each project to respond uniquely to place, climate, and community needs. The work was fast, efficient, and deeply collaborative, emerging as a collective response to social, environmental, and economic crises.
On winning the OBEL Award
For its "36 Projects in 36 Months" initiative, Colectivo C733 was awarded the OBEL Award, an international architecture prize that honors exceptional contributions to human development through innovative and impactful built environment solutions. Carrillo describes winning the OBEL Award as both a surprise and a lifesaver. "We didn't expect it," she says. "It saved us from being bankrupt." More than recognition, the award affirmed their belief in architecture that is efficient, empathetic, and deeply grounded. "We were working with the communities, with the territory, with the problems. We believe we can achieve spatial dignity."
Instead of replicating a single prototype, the team delivered variations on a flexible strategy—responsive to geography, material availability, and community needs. She cites inspiration from Eladio Dieste: public buildings should be "efficient, economical, logical, but all the time cosmic."
On a dock that redefines public architecture
Carrillo highlights two projects that bookend the initiative: the original Matamoros Market and the final Coparque Bacalar. The latter was commissioned as a community center but became something else entirely—a simple dock and observation platform set between lagoon and mangrove.
"They asked us to do a building, and our interpretation of building had switched," she says. It became a minimal, modular structure made of chicozapote wood, sensitive to the fragile ecosystem and oriented to light, wind, and the stars. The structure consists of just one repeated section, varying in height as it crosses land and water.
“We were asked to design a building, but what the site needed was a gesture—an open dock to observe the mangrove, the lagoon, and the stars.”
Carrillo notes that "three meters is the perfect size for anything to happen," describing how the dock serves as museum, meeting place, shade, and sky-watching platform. "Simple projects are not easy," she adds. "But they are the ones I want to pursue everywhere."
On teaching as layered practice
Carrillo sees no separation between her roles as architect, mother, and academic. "Everything is adding layers to this complexity of what it means to work with space and time," she says. Teaching, for her, is both a form of research and a way to build futures not yet possible in practice.
At Columbia GSAPP and elsewhere, she uses housing as a lens to examine questions of access, equity, and urban density. In post-earthquake Mexico, Carrillo co-founded a studio that explores how architecture can respond to emergency and fragility. The classroom, she says, offers a space to explore utopias. "From the very raw reality and crisis, you can approach futures that could be built in fifty years."
On using the minimum to achieve the most
Carrillo ends the conversation by reinforcing her belief that architecture should be generous, not extravagant.
“Doing good architecture doesn’t have to do with money. It has to do with a kind of intelligence—to do the minimum that could achieve the most.”
She explains that this principle guided every stage of the 36 Projects initiative, where the pressure to deliver quickly and affordably turned constraint into opportunity. During the pandemic, her team worked under intense time and budget pressures, sometimes relying on leftover funds from previous projects to stay afloat. Each project informed the next, evolving through trial, error, and iteration. The accelerated timeline and scarcity of resources demanded clarity of intent and simplicity of execution—refining design down to what truly mattered.
