Architecture as a Primary Form of Care - Interview with Tatiana Bilbao

Architecture as a Primary Form of Care - Interview with Tatiana Bilbao by Elisabetta Fauda Pichet and Brittany Siegert

What if architecture were understood first and foremost as care? Not only as efficiency or aesthetics — but as vessels to nurture bodies, minds, and communities. This was the unifying thread of a recent lecture and conversation with architect Tatiana Bilbao, who challenged students to think of buildings not only as physical shelters but as living platforms for dignity, conviviality, and political change. 

Tatiana Bilbao brings a distinct and influential perspective to contemporary architecture. A Mexico City native, she has developed a practice that resists the purely formal or economic logic often associated with building. Instead, her work insists that architecture is, above all, a social act — one that can and should be measured by the care it provides; she does not refer to care in a sentimental sense, but as a structural responsibility: to house, to sustain, to empower, and to nurture. 

Bilbao’s projects range widely, from social housing prototypes and community kitchens to experimental forms of collective living and urban densification. Between these scales, what unites her work is a refusal of simple definitions: a house is never just a house, a kitchen is never only a kitchen. Her architecture is both practical and poetic, political and intimate. And, as she often reminds her students, it should always raise more questions than answers. 

Housing as a Right, Housing as a Question

In Mexico, the right to housing has been enshrined in the constitution since 1917. Until recently it was framed as a right for every family but now is extended to every individual. Even so, Bilbao points out the gap between law and reality: providing a house does not guarantee a dignified life. 

What does dignified housing mean, then? For Bilbao, it is “the platform for a person to have a dignified and enjoyable place to live.” This is difficult, however, because she also emphasizes that “none of us, even with the same culture, [live] the same way.” As a result, rooms in her projects are often left deliberately unmarked. She resists linear processes. She refrains from dictating the use of spaces, and uses collage as one of her main tools for design, precisely because it allows multiple possibilities to coexist. Every project is approached differently, shaped by conversation and context. Spaces can be reinterpreted as lives evolve. This flexibility resists the way housing has been reduced to a product: efficient, replicable, stripped of imagination. 

This openness is also an ethical stance. Generalizations, she warns, leave people out. Data may describe a majority, but dignity lies in accounting for the extremes and the exceptions. But flexibility is also not emptiness. As Bilbao explains, “it’s not just nothingness. No, it has walls, it has volume, it has geometry, it has proportion, it has light. So it’s not nothing.” In other words, unlabelled space is not a void but a field of possibilities — a structure strong

enough to hold various lives without predetermining them. Care is refusing to close off futures before they arrive. 

Architecture as Politics

“Architecture is politics,” Bilbao says plainly. A building is never neutral: it enforces codes, distributes resources, and shapes who belongs and who is excluded. For her, the responsibility of the architect is not only to design but also to engage in the political frameworks that make design possible. 

She recalled the cooperative housing project La Borda in Barcelona, designed by the collective Lacol. It is significant not only because twenty families live there, but because it changed three pieces of local legislation; laws often outlive any single building. 

Bilbao’s own projects, like Tornel in Mexico City, seek to provoke similar outcomes. They resist the norms that have been baked into building code, and therefore challenge it – keeping the political conversation alive in hopes that the code will change and open doors for others as well. For her, there are many ways to act: through practice, through teaching, or even through direct political engagement. “If you engage in design,” she insists, “you should engage in the politics behind it.” 

Building With, Not For

Care also means humility. Working in informal settlements or in post-disaster contexts, Bilbao emphasizes the need to build trust before building structures. Too often, architects arrive with their own preconceptions of what communities need. But for her, the task is to listen, to understand, and to empower residents with knowledge and skills to shape their own environments. 

After the 2017 Mexico earthquake, her team decided not to impose any decisions. The residents knew perfectly well how they had lived: they knew what worked and what did not. What they lacked was only technical knowledge about new materials like steel and concrete, which had replaced traditional ones like earth and carrizo. The role of the architect, then, was not to dictate form but to share structural expertise — to ensure safety while leaving all other choices in the hands of the community. 

Bilbao, through architecture, politics, and education, challenges the expectation that we must produce in order to live and instead seeks the platform to make society understand that people must first exist and are only then able and capable to produce. She states definitively “for me, that’s the city of care.”