INSTANT-NATURE, located adjacent to the Plaza de la Solidaridad in Mexico City, is a deployable environment designed for the 2020 Festival of Architecture and City. Operating as a ready-made ecology, the pavilion is a gathering space dedicated to discussions about architecture and the production of nature. The pavilion’s strategies of packability and deployment draw attention to architecture’s ecological entourage, integrated into a complex system of resource extraction and environmental management. From pavilion to planter, this deployable garden creates a new species of social space for the city: mobilized, transient, and artificial. The pavilion’s light steel frame structure sits within an imported landscape of global plant specimens, each labeled with their indigenous point of origin and import-export histories. Using an inventory of annotated equipment, tagged details, and color-coded hardware, the project produces an atmospheric overlay of information and living material that makes legible the logistical networks, physical extractions, and commodity flows of architecture. By laying bare architecture’s tactics of ecological appropriation, this instant garden attempts to make visible the processes of production that shape our everyday environments.

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Arquine No. 22: MEXTRÓPOLI Pavilion, Mexico City Competition , 2020

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Project Leads: Daniel Jacobs, Brittany Utting

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Design Team: Jianing Cui, Emma Scott, Jared Widner