Mexico City–based architect Tatiana Bilbao considers domesticity from policy to livability. Models, drawings, and photographs illustrate Bilbao’s extensive research and proposals in response to how we live today. At the beginning of the design process, the architect and her firm Tatiana Bilbao Estudio take time to identify less visible external factors that influence and shape architecture, such as developer goals and civic regulations, as well as meeting with future inhabitants. This “outside in” approach is expansive, but yields greater understanding and accommodation for contemporary lifestyles.

Visitors are invited to consider how advocacy, city planning, architecture, and development shape society. The drawings, collage, and models on view represent built and unbuilt projects, and are shown together in a large-scale, hand-drawn landscape covering the gallery walls. One section of the exhibition brings into focus the San Francisco neighbourhood Hunters Point, whose residents — predominantly people of colour — have been subject to years of environmental injustice. Confronting the social and political contexts in which architects work, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio aims to prompt conversation around how to collaboratively transform formerly sequestered neighbourhoods into sustainable, inclusive communities.