José María Gómez de León
Portfolio
In addition to having worked in architecture offices since before graduating, have always considered it fundamental and essential to strike a balance between collaborations within an office and one’s own practice. I am sure that the experience gained from working in established offices provides immense knowledge and a holistic understanding of the various architectural practices in our country. However, I consider it of utmost importance to develop one’s own praxis, a personal line of thought, and personal growth where we can explore and enrich ourselves through projects that are not limited to those offered by the offices where we have worked.
The projects presented below are a selection of this pursuit that I began before graduating, which has led me to weave interdisciplinary teams and build relationships through projects where we have found common visions for the future of our city and our country.
The projects, mostly competitions and research projects, bear witness to my interests, concerns, and critical thinking about how our discipline can and should have a social and collective impact through creation.
In addition to having worked in architecture offices since before graduating, I have always considered it fundamental and essential to strike a balance between collaborations within an office and one’s own practice. I am sure that the experience gained from working in established offices provides immense knowledge and a holistic understanding of the various architectural practices in our country.
However, I consider it of utmost importance to develop one’s own praxis, a personal line of thought, and personal growth where we can explore and enrich ourselves through projects that are not limited to those offered by the offices where we have worked.
The projects presented below are a selection of this pursuit that I began before graduating, which has led me to weave interdisciplinary teams and build relationships through projects where we have found common visions for the future of our city and our country. The projects, mostly competitions and research projects, bear witness to my interests, concerns, and critical thinking about how our discipline can and should have a social and collective impact through creation.
Projects
One garden does not make a summer:
Fortuna Garden
Mexico City, 2017
≥ Abraham Zabludovsky Prize 2018 Finalists
Envisioning the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico in the next thirty years, a series of projects were proposed to address the needs of the capital city’s society in the future. This project proposes the creation of a new public, recreational, and metropolitan space through the reuse of an old railway site, on the outskirts of the Suburban Train.
The project not only serves as a new recreational area. It is suggested that a public space project can, in turn, function as a fundamental piece of connection between two neighborhoods (Industrial Vallejo and Azcapotzalco) and become a trigger for urban regeneration and transformation.
Team:
Emiliano Rode Aguilar
Academic supervisors:
Alejandro Rivadeneyra Herrera
Guillermo Springall del Villar
Félix Sánchez Aguilar
Program: Public Space, Infrastructure, Housing
In addition to representing an opportunity to explore the design of public space in the Industrial Vallejo area, the project served as a pretext to address the different scales of design and to generate a series of conclusions regarding tools from which the architectural and spatial scale of a project can contribute to the urban realm.
More city, less parking:
Urban Culture Centre “La Escalera” Mexico City, 2016 - 2017
≥ Competition organized by ITDP, IMCO, ReUrbano, and CoRe First place
An international call where interdisciplinary teams were tasked with proposing the reuse of existing public parking buildings in the Colonia Juárez.
The ‘Urban Culture Center La Escalera’ aims to be a public space with the goal of promoting awareness of the services and opportunities of living in the city through discussion, collaborative work, and continuous education in recreational, flexible, and commercial spaces. It will be a place that seeks to encourage the generation and exchange of ideas related to urban culture, using visual arts as a catalyst to achieve this.
‘La Escalera’ will be part of a network of urban culture centers aimed at the intervention and formal utilization of parking buildings to create freely accessible venues that encourage the participation of residents in their environment and promote the enjoyment of the city, thereby improving social cohesion and the possibilities of interaction among different actors in Mexico City.
Team:
Jorge Ramos Alvarado
Emilio Romero Sabre
María Villalpando Páez
Program: Cultural, Infrastructure
Water Corridor : Urban Intervention en Álvaro Obregón
Mexico City, 2019
≥ Competition organized by Escuela Digital Second place
International call to develop proposals for intervention along Avenida Álvaro Obregón in the Roma neighborhood, intervention in Juan Rulfo Park, and the creation of a mixed-use building with social housing facing the park.
The project aims to rethink green spaces in urban contexts in Mexico City, using water as the main shaping element of the space. By altering the topography of public space, new uses will be generated for squares and parks, promoting neighborly coexistence and utilizing rainwater for capture, filtration, and maintenance of the space itself. Team:
Ramos Alvarado Diego González Albarrán Program: Public Space, Commerce, Housing
Street
Fountain
Viewpoint-Staircase
Juan Rulfo Park promotes integration through changes in elevation, slopes, and vegetation, creating a different way of inhabiting space without interruptions, encouraging encounters in collective spaces.
At intersections, a semaphore reconfiguration will be implemented to allow for a new distribution of vehicle waits, reducing visual, environmental, and auditory pollution.
Spaces of intimacy in violent contexts:
Young Creators Grant, 2019-2020
Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, 2020
≥ Scholarship from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts
Is it possible to create moments of intimacy in public space without compromising the safety of inhabitants? This project proposes that both conditions can coexist in marginalized areas lacking public spaces in the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico. The project takes as a model the residential areas of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a municipality with a reticular and modular urban layout that would allow the development of a network of replicable neighborhood-scale public spaces.
Through four design strategies (Topography, Reflections and transparencies, Light and shadow, Materiality), the project presents a series of proposals, working models, diagrams, and conclusions based on research where space and the architectural scale of urban design were the protagonists.
Program: Recreational public space, Infrastructure
Without seeking to reach ideal or final proposals, the project was approached as research, with all material created manually, where the design process served as a tool for reflection through which conclusions and discoveries about intimacy in recreational public space emerged.
Agave Reserach Center
Félix Candela Competition, 2020
≥ Félix Candela International Competition 50 shortlisted proposals
Located in the heart of the Central Valleys of Oaxaca and at a pivotal point on the Mezcal Route, the project aims to encourage, in one of the most marginalized areas of our country, tourism and economic activity to expand from the state capital to nearby towns, consolidating a network of destinations that boost and enhance the economic and cultural activity of the region.
Landscape - Time - City:
Experimental Museum “El Eco”
Mexico City, 2021
≥ Workshop held at the Experimental Museum “El Eco”
The workshop “Landscape - Time,” led by Diego Rivero Borrell and Pedro Aparicio Llorente as part of the museum’s outreach programs, aimed to generate reflections through different concepts presented in four sessions of lectures and debates.
The four speakers presented provocations and exercises where the workshop participants reacted through drawings, texts, and audiovisual content, interpreting the concepts presented by each one. At the end of the workshop, all the works were compiled into a digital publication.
The following reflections seek to link the landscape to our urban context. It is an effort to diagram phenomena that occur in public space, related to the provocations of each lecture (Causality, Cosmos, Resonance, and Chance), demonstrating the ongoing dialogue between objects and bodies, nature and artificiality, the built and the unbuilt, the dynamic and the static.
Workshop led by:
Diego Rivero Borrell
Pedro Aparicio Llorente Galia Eibenschutz
Jerónimo Hagerman
Program: Recreational Public Space, Landscape
Public space forms a fundamental part of the urban landscape. A Causality - Simultaneity
Cosmos – Distance
Landscape reflects and modifies the social dynamics that occur within it.
Social dynamics, in turn, transform the landscape.
This correlation determines our way of understanding the city.
It’s not just the elements that comprise it, but also the distance between them.
Proximity and distancing create new tensions and relaxations.
With greater distancing, one begins to approach another constellation.
Proximity and distancing are related: one provokes the other.
Where there is a void due to distancing, there is an approach in another cosmos.
The memory of something that was, something that used to be, in the urban
Absence and emptiness are also manifestations of a memory.
The repetition of elements, when encountering emptiness, becomes more
Urban emptiness raises questions through memory and recollection.
The dialogue between the built environment and nature is constant in the urban
Natural processes take shape as time passes.
Nature progressively transforms the dynamics in urban space.
This transformation changes the way these spaces are perceived.
Space is never the same, even when the built elements are static.
Sports City : Urban Intervention in Iztacalco Mexico City, 2021
≥ Competition organized by Escuela Digital and SEDUVI Finalists and Honorable Mention
An international call for proposals for the regeneration of the south corner of the Palacio de los Deportes and the HR Racetrack along with a hotel and mixed-use building. As a team, we decided to cover a larger polygon area for greater influence in the zone and the capital.
The urban regeneration project brings together a series of interventions in both public and private spaces with the aim of reconciling the relationship between streets, entertainment and sports centers, commercial premises, and recreational areas, in order to give new meaning to one of the most emblematic places in Mexico City. With the creation of a vehicular tunnel, the corridor will have a large linear plaza on the surface that will connect the various destinations at the same level.
Team: Jorge Ramos Alvarado Diego González Albarrán
Program: Public Space, Commerce, Housing
To the south of the corridor, the mixed-use building will serve both regular users of the corridor and the area, as well as occasional visitors. By preserving the existing structure of a factory, an emblematic silhouette of the industrial area to which it belongs, both ventilation and natural lighting will be utilized to create a series of interior courtyards that articulate the commercial and cultural modules.
At the pedestrian level, the boundaries of the site are made transparent with a double-height perimeter portico, generating interior promenades, unobstructed views, and tree-lined spaces from the street to the center of the project.
The house revolves around a series of courtyards that create a diagonal spatial sequence, articulating and providing access to the different parts of the program. The central element of the house is the swimming pool, which is seamlessly integrated into the structure of the house, alongside the central courtyard. In this way, the house functions like a pavilion, breaking the common division between recreation and living spaces.
The house is designed to promote a sense of connection with the surrounding environment, blurring the boundaries between indoor and outdoor spaces. Large windows and sliding doors allow natural light and ventilation to permeate the interior, while also providing views of the landscaped gardens and courtyards.
Each courtyard is designed to serve a specific function, whether it’s for dining, relaxation, or socializing. Overall, the design of the house prioritizes both functionality and aesthetics, creating a harmonious balance between form and function. The integration of courtyards and the swimming pool into the overall layout adds a unique architectural character to the residence.
Arts Building : School Extension Mexico City, 2023
≥ Competition organized by Lancaster School First place
The call requested the expansion of the current primary school campus of Lancaster School to build the Arts Building, a Multipurpose Hall, and the remodeling of the existing Library volume.
The intervention aims to unify the entire school program into a single integrated volume articulated through a new lobby and hybrid access plaza. Making use of exposed materials and following the construction logic of the existing buildings of both campuses, the proposal will generate a new heart for the community as well as new ways of inhabiting an academic setting, in constant contact with the exterior and nature. A new hybrid access plaza can be used pedestrianly, as a drop-off and pick-up bay, or as an extension of the parking lot when there is increased vehicle traffic.
Program: Educational
Integrating currently disconnected elements.
Stage 01: Arts Building and new entrance facade.
Consolidating two central circulation axes.
Stage 02: Vertical circulations and a new Ecological Area. 03. Creating a new “heart” for the entire community.
Stage 03 New hybrid plaza and vehicular access.
The Multipurpose Hall will become the heart of the campus, which can open up to the outside or be completely closed when necessary. The new classrooms propose a new teaching approach in constant contact with the exterior and nature. These can open at their ends, protected from the sun by brick eaves and generating cross ventilation. On the second level, the Arts Courtyard will foster exchange between different disciplines in a contained environment.
UTOPIAS program and public space access
Mexico City, 2024
≥ Individual Research - Urban Inequalities
LSE MSc City Design and Social Science
Research project to identify different accessibility levels to public space and public infrastructure within the borough of Iztapalapa in Mexico City. The projects evaluates, through GIS mapping, the extent to which the UTOPIAS public program (from 2018-2023) increased accessibility to public space within the borough.
The first map shows existing public spaces in Iztapalapa in 2018. It is important to say that the public spaces considered were only the ones that can be used for recreational purposes and that can be defined as independent spaces from the street.
on the
incorporating the
This map aims to calculate the area of influence of these spaces by creating a series of buffers; an 800m buffer of influence is applied for the public spaces with an area larger than 1 hectare, which would mean a 15-minute walk distance; public spaces smaller than 1 hectare have a 300m buffer, which implies a 5-minute walk.
Compared to the 2018 data, this represents 100,000 more people than the 1.54 million that had access to public space in 2018 within the studied area. Similarly, if we focus only on the population within Iztapalapa, we find that the number grows from 1.42 million in 2018, to at least 1.52 million people.
To analyse quantitatively the impact of the UTOPÍAS program, the previous GIS-generated maps were updated with the location of 16 of these centres. This map shows a new buffer of 800m around these to calculate the population that benefits from these new centres.
The last map highlights the blocks that benefited from the UTOPÍAS program through the established “walkable” buffer in previous maps.
The Right to the Waterfront
Urban Intervention in Canary Wharf
London, 2024
≥ Research Studio - Group Project
LSE MSc City Design and Social Science
This project explores urban waterfront revitalization with a focus on social justice, aiming to reduce inequalities in access and enjoyment. Historically central to city development, many urban waterways have become underutilized post-industrially. Focusing on Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs, the study examines factors limiting public access and proposes strategies to enhance equitable use. Through site analysis, stakeholder engagement, and comparisons to similar developments, the project aims to leverage waterfront revitalization for greater social equity.
The project addresses its research question by first analyzing the site’s history and geographical conditions, followed by an exploration of public access barriers. A stakeholder analysis highlights the challenges posed by privatized waterfronts, particularly the role of the Canal & River Trust. The research also includes a case study comparison and policy recommendations, culminating in a strategy focused on site activation, spatial redesign, and policy measures to promote accessibility.
The proposed interventions include the creation of a new pedestrian bridge, redesigning public spaces to encourage use, and developing a swimmable water basin for recreational and educational purposes. Temporary activities like open-air cinemas and markets, alongside permanent spatial changes, aim to transform the site from a place of transition into a community hub. The project also emphasizes collaboration with local groups, ensuring that marginalized communities benefit from the development. Policy recommendations target national and borough-level actors to ensure equitable access across London’s waterfronts.
Estates: the value of shared spaces in community life in London’s council housing
≥ Mater’s Dissertation
LSE MSc City Design and Social Science
This paper delves into the history and present-day value that shared spaces offer to dwellers, neighbours, and non-residents beyond their estates. It considers what the loss of these spaces in contemporary and neoliberal housing models implies and what lessons can we learn from these spaces that are discreetly enmeshed in our daily urban experiences. Specifically, the main research question asks: what role have shared spaces had in the community life of post-war council housing, and how do they relate to the rest of the city?
This research project focused on two estates: the Churchill Gardens and the Lillington and Longmoore Gardens, located in Westminster. Through archival and ethnographical research, this project deepened my understanding of the housing crisis in London and the value that shared spaces and social housing have.
Academic supervisor: David Madden
Projects in architecture studios
Serpentine Pavilion
London, 2018
The proposal is generated from the intersection of two guiding lines: the existing orientation of the original gallery and the geographic North taking the Greenwich Meridian as reference. The offset creates a succession of three spaces with different atmospheres and relationships between interior and exterior.
Concept Schematic Design
2019-2024
The master plan for the hotel is conceived through the overlay of two systems: a ground floor featuring punctual, stone-clad, organic interventions; and a series of elevated, lightweight, reticular structures made of tropical wood that house the hotel’s rooms and villas. This juxtaposition creates a dynamic interplay between the solid, grounded elements of the base and the airy, elevated structures above, harmonizing nature-inspired design with modern architectural sensibilities.+
Each element of the master plan is meticulously designed to enhance the guest experience, with a keen focus on integrating the surrounding landscape into every aspect of the hotel’s design. From the moment guests arrive, they are enveloped in a tranquil oasis where the boundaries between indoor and outdoor spaces blur, inviting them to unwind and reconnect with nature.
Frida Escobedo Studio Design leader
Concept Schematic Design Construction Documents
Photographs: César
Béjar
Institute of Contemporary Art Chapultepec
Ciudad de México, 2018 - 2019
This visionary project seeks to breathe new life into the historic Café del Lago building nestled within the tranquil surroundings of the Second Section of Chapultepec Forest. With a focus on preserving its architectural heritage while embracing contemporary functionality, the aim is to transform the structure into the vibrant hub of the Institute of Contemporary Art of Chapultepec.
Through a meticulous process akin to archaeological excavation, layers of past renovations will be carefully peeled away to reveal the timeless beauty of the original design. The distinctive hyperbolic paraboloids that define the building’s silhouette will be celebrated and repurposed to create dynamic spaces that inspire creativity and innovation.
Frida Escobedo Studio Project Leader
Concept Schematic Design
Cultural Status: Unbuilt
Guadalajara International Airport
Guadalajara, 2019
The conceptual proposal aims not only to expand the commercial area of the Terminal but also to transform it into a dynamic, multifunctional space that harmoniously integrates with its urban surroundings. To achieve this, an innovative expansion system has been devised that leverages the existing structural grid of the Terminal to shape two towers that serve as centers of activity and connectivity.
These towers not only function as commercial extensions but also create a series of covered outdoor spaces that provide shelter and comfort to users, both pedestrians and drivers. Furthermore, the facade of these towers has been intelligently designed to change its perception based on the movement of motorized traffic, creating a dynamic and captivating visual effect.
2033
The tower’s location in Harlem, New York, holds significant cultural and historical importance, currently housing the National Black Theatre. In the proposed project, this rich cultural heritage will be honored and integrated into the design of the tower’s base, serving as a tribute to the neighborhood’s past while embracing its future.
Emphasizing community engagement and social interaction, the residential tower will feature innovative architectural elements such as excavated spaces and varied volumetric compositions. These design strategies aim to foster a sense of belonging and vertical community living, offering residents opportunities for coexistence, recreation, and cultural exchange within the vibrant urban fabric of Harlem.
Frida Escobedo Studio Project leader
Concept Schematic Design
Mixed use building
Status: Construction Documents
José María Gómez de León josemariagomezdeleon@gmail.com