Pablo Pérez Palacios to Present 'Infinite Openness' Virtual Lecture March 7

Rafael Gamo

Pachuca Apartments in Mexico City

Pablo Pérez Palacios will present an online lecture at 4 p.m., Monday, March 7, as part of the spring lecture series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

Pérez Palacios is the founder of Pérez Palacios Arquitectos Asociados (PPAA), an architecture studio located in Mexico City that defines itself as an independent professional practice concentrated on architecture, art, urban and interior design. He is also a 2022 John G. Williams Distinguished Visitor in Architecture.

The Fay Jones School's spring lecture series is presented in collaboration with Places Journal, an internationally respected online journal of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism.

Registration for the online lecture is available on Zoom.

In his lecture, "Infinite Openness," Pérez Palacios will explain the firm's projects and their creative process through a series of subjects that are significant to their approach to architecture. Their architecture emerges through understanding that their creative process is an open one, an open medium and message, that is constantly put to the test by the multiple relations in its surroundings.

He will present the values in his practice and focus on their inclination for an architecture based on ideas, not forms — an architecture that aims to create sensorial atmospheres.

Nature, context and all its factors — geography, timing, program, influence — weighs in the firm's architecture in a strong but not direct way. This creates a dialog between contradictory ideas that leads to an autonomous architecture that adapts individually to each project.

Pérez Palacios will discuss how his firm likes to come up with a response that is strong but simple, with a geometrical approach where the exterior space is defined and bounded but not built. Their architectural approach works with light, suggesting precisely the kind of openness intended for each project — an openness between the visitors and the architecture, and between the architecture and its surroundings.

He received a bachelor's degree in architecture from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña in Barcelona, and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University in New York City. From 2007 to 2017, he established and worked with DCPP Architects along with Alfonso de la Concha.

He founded Pérez Palacios Arquitectos Asociados in 2018. The firm's way of understanding architecture implies that work cannot be done without considering both communal and personal intentions. Therefore, its conception of architecture is based on an understanding of the body and the relationship everyone establishes with their surroundings. Taking this into account, each project seeks to be an extension or support of their experience, personal as well as spatial.

As a firm, they believe that this can be summed up in the architectural rehearsal, which is the way that modern architecture should be understood. The architectural rehearsal is a vehicle of approaching the self; the more people rehearse, the more they understand. Furthermore, for architecture to be capable of conveying an idea or intention, it has to speak of the individual, or the sum of individuals, and the way they relate to their environment in both a sensorial and emotional level.

The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects.

This virtual lecture is free and open to the public. For details on watching the lecture online, please visit the Fay Jones School's lecture page. To register for the entire online lecture series, complete this form on Zoom.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or fayjones.uark.edu.