Michan Architecture is a studio based in Mexico City founded in 2010. The practice operates as a laboratory of architecture, exploring new possibilities within the discipline. We see architecture as a flirtation towards the built environment; a question towards the norm, a speculation of what the future can be.
The studio has been awarded by the Architectural League of New York with The League Prize for Young Architects + Designers 2020. In 2019 they were recipients of Design Vanguard award from Architectural Record Magazine, which honors 10 emerging practices from around the world. "That are demonstrating inventive approaches to shaping the built environment." DL1310 Apartment Building designed in collaboration with Young & Ayata received the 2019 Progressive Architecture Award from Architect Magazine. AL apartment received the American Architecture Prize in residential architecture 2017. In 2015 Z53 Social Housing won an Architizer Award, for Low cost housing. The work of the studio has been widely published and exhibit.
The practice is led by Isaac Michan Daniel. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Universidad Iberoamericana with studies at RMIT and a Master of Science in Architecture from Pratt Institute. He teaches at Universidad Anahuac and has been a professor at Universidad Iberoamericana and the AA Visiting School in Mexico City.
We pursue architecture as a material practice, hybridizing local craft with digital and analogue thinking. The work is a reaction to existing conditions, it strives to find a fine balance for the familiar, yet at precise completely weird. For us this midpoint is where the work is able to speak with the past without copying the recipes, while looking forward for new ways to misbehave mater and tectonics.
Our work is situated at the tension between conventional and complex systems in the pursuit of a strange hybridization that deals with the autonomy and various contingencies of each project, such as its program, budget, and context; we regard them not as limitations, but rather as opportunities to produce an architecture that is uncanny and yet grounded in the world.
For our built work, which grows within a hybrid process that oscillates between digital and analogue techniques from its conceptual development to its built stage, we find great affinity in our process of exploring emerging technologies and how they translate into local craft, while understanding both the potential and the limitations of each type of media. We like to personalize each tool, break it, and then use it through an unorthodox but rigorous method to produce an ambiguous work, uncertain of its age.