Architecture Beyond Style: Wonne Ickx on PRODUCTORA’s Path and the Value of Contradiction

PRODUCTORA makes buildings in Mexico City and well beyond it—cultural centers, museums, housing—and is just as interested in the ones already standing. The studio works out of one itself: a former textile factory in the Doctores neighbourhood that it has been converting floor by floor into workspaces for a diverse group of creative companies. PRODUCTORA prefers a disciplined attention to contemporary architecture—geometry, material restraint, and the slow work of making buildings that can endure both use and time. Spaces are organized so that they remain legible even as programs shift, materials chosen for the way they age rather than the way they first appear. The firm treats each commission as an occasion to adjust the surrounding urban context—adding a plaza, a shortcut, a place to pause. The work has been widely recognized, and PRODUCTORA stays wary of settling into a house style, treating its own internal contradictions as something worth keeping.

hube spoke to Wonne Ickx, one of PRODUCTORA’s founders. A Belgian architect who settled in Mexico at the turn of the millennium, he brought to the partnership a perspective shaped by urban studies and a sustained engagement with contemporary art. Today, Ickx appears less interested in consolidation than in the open questions that remain: how architecture might still claim a cultural rather than purely technical authority, and how a building, once completed, can continue to be rewritten by the lives that inhabit it. In the following conversation, he reflects on the Mexico City that shaped the studio’s first years, the reason scarce resources can sharpen an idea rather than dilute it, and his conviction that a finished building should go on being changed.

hube: What drew you to Mexico City in the early 2000s, and how did the city’s layered history, urban intensity, and social realities influence your decision to co-found PRODUCTORA there in 2006?

Wonne Ickx: I first went to Mexico in the late 1990s to study “urban studies”—urban geography, urban economy, urban anthropology—in Guadalajara. I always saw architecture as an urban and collective exercise. I later ended up in Mexico City where I founded PRODUCTORA with Carlos Bedoya and Víctor Jaime, both local architects from Mexico City, and Argentine architect Abel Perles (no longer part of the firm). In hindsight, I believe that the different reading of the built environment between two “foreigners” and two locals was crucial to define our practice and our relation to Mexican culture.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mexico City was an endless source of energy and inspiration for us. There were an important emerging art scene and the rise of new musical genres, with many friends performing electro-cumbia, for example. It was also the birth of a really strong food culture, combining local (often pre-hispanic) traditions with international cuisine. Elena Reygadas, the owner of Rosetta and now a world-famous Michelin-starred chef, would cater events in our architecture studio—just out of friendship, to support us. I would never dare to ask her for such a favor today!

One of the first projects PRODUCTORA realized was the design for a Francis Alÿs exhibition in the center of Mexico City. There can be no better example of how the complexity of the city itself was at the heart of what everybody was doing, and how the surreal urban reality of Mexico City itself was the driving force of a cultural boom.

h: PRODUCTORA is known for precise geometries, legible forms with minimal gestures, and a search for timelessness through materiality and space. What core principles or shared sensibilities united the founding partners from the beginning?

WI: We started working together quite pragmatically (we rented an office space to do competitions outside our regular daytime jobs) and without a clear idea of a shared project. I think that was actually important: we were still young enough not to have a fixed working method or a defined design ideology, which allowed us to come together from different backgrounds and perspectives and to shape our intellectual project collectively—on the go, as we began to take on projects and resolve architectural challenges.

That said, there were, of course, interests we shared. I would say that in those early years minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd and Richard Serra and people from the land art movement like Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer were very influential to us. The idea that something could be simultaneously very autonomous and formally driven—and yet be highly contextual and related to the earth, topography, and landscape—was fascinating to us. And then there were all these connections to Mexico. The amazing Hotel Palenque lecture by Smithson, which has become a key reference to us in terms of adaptive reuse and thinking about the life cycle of buildings. Or the excavations Heizer attended in Mexico, accompanying his father who was an important archaeologist studying pre-Hispanic cultures and Indigenous cultures in North America.