"Nueva Vivienda" Book Launch

Presenting their new book Nueva Vivienda: New Housing Paradigms in Mexico at Rice University, Jesús Vassallo and (NYRA’s own) Sebastián López Cardozo discussed “multiples against monoliths” as a way to “produce housing that is more empathetic to the city around it.” What started off as a symposium in 2020 turned into a writing project with the ambition to “showcase a contemporary body of work happening in Mexico, with the aim to center it as exemplary.”

Nueva Vivienda spans three scales: single-family homes, urban infill developments, and high rise mega-blocks. At the launch, the editor-duo argued that the lessons taken from the infill projects are particularly relevant to American and Canadian cities trying to re-densify their urban centers. During the Q&A, audience members also discussed insights into preserving cultural understandings of property and underlying complicity between architects and capital.