Chinampa Veneta

Faced with the global ecological crisis, the project selected by the Ministry of Culture and the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia promotes a reflection on how we inhabit, cultivate, and design the world we share. Chinampa Veneta starts with the chinampas agricultural system, of Mesoamerican origin and still in force in Xochimilco, a historic lake ecosystem south of Mexico City. This ancient knowledge, which interweaves landscape, infrastructure, and technique, is reimagined in the context of La Biennale, activating a living environment in an emblematic city.
Chinampas are an ancient agricultural system with more than four thousand years of history. They are located in shallow lakes and are built in the form of rectangular blocks with layers of sediment, mud, and vegetation. Flowers, vegetables, and other foods are grown there. Their beautiful geometric arrangements, in addition to forming channels, multiply the banks of the lake, creating ecological niches for feeding, reproduction and shelter, which detonate an explosion of biodiversity.
Each element of the chinampa system is equally important and generates symbiotic relationships that promote life, capture carbon, purify water, and produce food and oxygen. In a world on the brink of ecological collapse, chinampas show us a path to the future.
The chinampas were conceived from an ancestral worldview in which humans were an active part of the natural cycles of life, unlike modernity, which desperately tries to control them. In Xochimilco, as in Venice—both declared World Heritage Sites in 1987—we have witnessed the alarming speed with which urban development can consume thriving ecosystems.
Chinampa Veneta is composed of several enactments. One of them is located inside the Arsenale, where a system of chinampas is represented. Each chinampa shows a different moment in their growth process. The enactment begins with the regeneration of a chinampa from a chapin, a small cube of nutrient-rich mud that holds a seed inside. The protagonist is in the center: a living chinampa, different from its predecessors in Mexico, planted with an agroforestry system practiced in the Veneto, la vite maritata—in which the vine grows intertwined with the trees—in coexistence with a traditional Mesoamerican polyculture system: the milpa.
Another enactment floats symbolically in the Venetian Lagoon, as an analogy to the Teatro del Mondo by Aldo Rossi, who conceived of theater as a fulcrum between architecture and the imaginary, capable of building bridges between worlds. On this occasion, the theater becomes the Chinampa del Mondo and presents itself in a proudly ancestral, natural and organic way, in front of the built environment of the city of Venice, creating a new link between two lake cities whose water histories reflect a political struggle for drinking water and territory.
Chinampa Veneta arrives in Venice to remind us that soil health directly impacts our well-being as a society, and invites us to imagine design processes that reintegrate life cycles, so that our built environment is no longer in opposition to nature.
In a world that never ceases to grow and spread, chinampas force us to stop and look to the past. The National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature selected Chinampa Veneta for being an innovative proposal that expands the notion of architectural design towards a symbiotic process that co-designs with the ecosystem, with the natural environment, and in a collective manner.
The Pavilion of Mexico is located in the former naval complex known as El Arsenale and will be open from May 10 to November 23, 2025. The opening will take place on May 8 at 5:15 p.m., Venice time. It will begin with a conversation between farmers from Xochimilco and Venice, who will share their experiences around their territories, cultivation practices and links with regenerative agriculture.

Credits:

Comissioner: José María Bilbao Rodríguez

Colectivo Chinampa Veneta: Estudio Ignacio Urquiza y Ana Paula de Alba, Estudio María Marín de Buen, ILWT, Locus, Lucio Usobiaga Hegewisch & Nathalia Muguet, Pedro&Juana

Aldo Urban, Ana Paula de Alba, Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo, Andrea Mejía, Diego Manzano, Emilio M. Frausto, Federico de Antuñano, Ignacio Urquiza Seoane, Isabel Brocado, Jachen Schleich, Javiera Elicer, Lucio Usobiaga Hegewisch, Lucero Chaires, María Marín de Buen, Martina Duque, Mecky Reuss, Michela Lostia di Santa Sofia, Miguel Ángel Vega Ruiz, Nathalia Muguet, Paulina García Ortíz, Rodrigo Huesca, Sana Frini, Santiago Sitten, Shantal Gabriela Haddad Gómez, Xavier Delgado González, Yavanna Latapí

RUBRA

Located on Mexico’s Pacific coast, Rubra is a restaurant designed by Ana Paula de Alba and Ignacio Urquiza for chef Daniela Soto-Innes.

The project is located on the Punta Mita peninsula, at one end of Banderas Bay. Lush vegetation flanks the access route. Guests can arrive on foot, by bicycle, or in a golf cart, along a path that disconnects them from the urban context and leads to a blind façade, inviting curiosity about what lies beyond.

A low tunnel (2.1 meters high and 6 meters long) emerges in the main terrace, a large space with views of the Sierra Madre Occidental and the ocean horizon across the bay.

The space is made up of volumes of different heights, shapes, and dimensions, elements that define the structure and contain the program: an open kitchen, wine cellar, and bars. The flowerbeds also provide benches and the main seating area for visitors.

These volumes structure the complex and the layout is both strategic and precise, creating a spatial composition and directing views onto the natural surroundings, keeping the built environment out of sight and giving a sense of seclusion. This layout also produces openings for breezes to cool the space through cross ventilation.

A large roof spans a column-free, 10 x 15-meter space, structured by a pergola grid that frames wooden lattices, allowing continuous light to enter during the day. Volumes such as the wine cellar, bar, and open kitchen act as structural elements supporting this roof, giving the perfect amount of shade in the roofed exterior.

Depending on the weather, a sliding glass façade can enclose the main dining room to create a climate-controlled interior space protected from the elements while maintaining an outdoors feel.

Rubra is made of a single material, and Pablo Kobayashi helped create this monolithic monochrome stained and textured concrete structure in clear allusion to sand. Its rigid and precise modulation is softened by the rounded corners of the volumes, evoking the classic Mexican architecture of the Pacific coast.

A balance between the color palette of the wooden furniture and the lush green of the vegetation is designed to complement and clad the sand-hued structure. The interior landscaping by Thalia Davidoff incorporates endemic plant species, as if some of the Nayarit jungle had been brought to each flowerbed and green space, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior, and between the natural and the built environment. This creates the sensation of complete immersion in this coast’s emblematic shoreline: on the beach, between ocean and jungle.

All of the accessories were bespoke creations for this project. The furniture—chairs, benches, tables, table and service accessories, storage furniture, coat stands—was co-designed by Ana Paula and our studio. The tableware, pans, sculptures, and other utensils were specially made by a talented group of guest designers, such as Claire Lippman (CHerie), Nouvel Glass, Mauviel and Carlos Matos.

Guests will enjoy a unique culinary experience with the signature touch of Daniela and her team, from the layout to the very last detail. Plantlife, the sea, and privacy all come together in the cool, soft light reminiscent of the shade of palm-thatched enramadas.

Rubra is a discreet intervention. The repeated use of a single material creates a peaceful architecture that eliminates distractions, for a unique, simple and perfectly balanced gastronomic experience.

Cárpatos

The project is located in a low-density residential area in Mexico City, where zoning rules currently permit one house to be built per each 1,000 m2 of land. In this area, there are a number of lots that were subdivided before this norm came into force, but they are few and they tend to have specific characteristics. In this case we worked with a 400 m2 site that has a 10-meter frontage and is 40 meters in depth.

The narrow, elongated site—combined with the strict norms in force—were the first external factors determining the form of the house. The restrictions to the front and the rear, both of 5 meters, combined with the lateral setback of 3 meters, decide the exact perimeter of the construction.

The design strategy pointed towards creating the largest possible interior space, while seeking a sensation of openness and a continuous relationship with the exterior. As a result, a perimeter garden—designed to be like a cloud forest—surrounds three sides of the steel and glass structure. At the center of the project, adjacent to the vertical circulations, another garden is inserted in a void that multiplies this interior-exterior relationship and the breadth, while also functioning as a nucleus regulating the ambient temperature.

The rigidity of the volume is softened with specific gestures and interventions; the strict modulation is adapted to the use and the program it contains, while the perimeter of the exterior space is continually interrupted by vegetation. The basement voids suggest an interior and exterior circulation of the volume; the reflective façade endows it with a shifting appearance that makes it different and new over the course of the day and with new weather conditions.

The interior of the volume is dynamic, with double-height spaces, bridges and roofed external terraces that interweave with the structure to generate a spatial sensation that flows with the exterior and the habitation of the box.

The program is grouped and distributed by floor; a basement contains the services and additional uses such as gym, games room, office and wine cellar. The first floor distributes the social areas of the house and establishes them in direct relation to the perimeter garden. The second floors comprises three bedrooms, while the roof terrace, between adjacent gardens and clay roofs, is an extension of the house’s social space, wholly given over to a children’s play area. These four levels are articulated by the vertical circulations and the different voids that break up the uniformity of the box.

The color of the structure is borrowed from the Pantone of Le Corbusier, and chosen to blend perfectly with the green hues of the vegetation and the landscape.

The blue/green tinted windows act as mirrors on the outside, reflecting the skies, landscape and adjacent constructions. The intention is to camouflage the house with the immediate surroundings; the windows, together with the light gray stucco calms the light in the interior and gives the cold and rigid volume a feeling of unexpected warmth.

The Lorena Vieyra furnishings and the different layers and textures of the curtains selected for the home interiors establish an interplay with the transparencies and dress the whole. Together with the existing vegetation and landscaping by Thalia Davidoff, all these elements reinforce the sensation of inhabiting a cloud forest where the clarity that marks a division between the interior, the exterior and the physical limits of the property is blurred.