The year 2016 marks the thirtieth year since I founded TEN Arquitectos (Taller Enrique Norten) in Mexico City, fifteen years before opening a second studio in New York in 2001. Over the last three decades, I have had the privilege to lead an amazing group of talents that has allowed us to collaboratively design more than 300 projects, a quarter of which have been completed or are currently under construction. Looking retrospectively at the many projects we have designed and built, the people we have collaborated with, and the locations we have been allowed to explore in our research and initiatives, we are now able to identify several themes and investigations that have been a constant common ground in our work and that now in a more conscious way we are pushing in our current explorations. We have been interested in an architecture that is much bigger than the isolated object that infatuated our modern predecessors, or the architecture that has aspired to be a spectacle and has created the cacophony of our urban experience that many others have proposed in the recent past. We are intrigued with the possibilities of our discipline as public space, as infrastructure, and as landscape and territory. We are interested in a much more responsible urbanism and the sustainable responsibilities of our profession. These investigations do not individually define any one project, but they collectively describe how we approach our work, whether recently completed or in process, and what we believe is at the root of our office. All architecture has a public dimension and must be attuned to the possibility of enhancing civic relations and human experiences. Our projects strive to connect people to people, and people to the city, to serve as a platform for social exchange. The responsibility of architecture does not stop at the limits of the objects that comprise our urban environments, but in the creation of public space where a more equal and democratic way of life for all...
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