Lanza Atelier Presents Experimental Furniture Collection During Mexico City Art Week
Mexican studio Lanza Atelier, this year’s Serpentine Pavilion designer, has unveiled a solo exhibition titled Azul y Verde at AGO Projects during Mexico City Art Week. The show presents a diverse body of furniture, ranging from functional to sculptural, incorporating reused materials such as rebar and up-cycled sail fabric.
This marks the studio’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and reflects the material and conceptual diversity that has characterised its work since its founding in 2015.
Colour as a Cultural and Perceptual Concept
At the centre of the exhibition is a quarter-circle rug divided into blue and green, serving as a unifying visual and conceptual element. According to the studio, the rug reflects the idea of colour as a fluid concept, shaped by perception and culture rather than fixed definitions.
This approach is echoed throughout the collection, where material contrasts—soft versus hard, opaque versus translucent—are used to explore how perceived oppositions can dissolve.
Reused Materials and Perceptual Experiments
Highlighted pieces include a sofa and armchair made of powder-coated steel and upholstered with up-cycled boat sails, as well as wooden chairs with double backs and rotated orientations designed to challenge the viewer’s perception.
The exhibition also features scaffold-like wooden shelving, a high-gloss black table with a gear-shaped top, and a polished aluminium coffee table with a glass surface functioning as a display vitrine.
Between Architecture and Object
Lanza Atelier approaches furniture as architecture at a different scale, rejecting rigid boundaries between disciplines. This philosophy is evident in the metal works on display, including a lamp combining rebar and delicate paper, directly embodying the exhibition’s focus on contrast.
A Forward Look for Architects
The exhibition points to a broader architectural trajectory in which furniture becomes a testing ground for ideas around materiality, perception, and sustainability. For architects, it offers insight into how reused materials and cross-scale thinking can enrich architectural narratives and expand the design process beyond conventional building typologies.
✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight
Lanza Atelier’s Azul y Verde positions furniture as a form of contemporary architectural practice, operating at an intimate scale while retaining spatial and conceptual ambition. The exhibition assembles functional and sculptural objects built from reused materials such as rebar, timber, and up-cycled sail fabric, with colour deployed as a cultural and perceptual device rather than decoration. However, beyond its material experimentation, the work raises questions about contextual relevance and longevity: do these pieces function primarily as critical artefacts within the gallery, or can their architectural logic translate into everyday use? The deliberate tension between softness and rigidity, clarity and ambiguity, suggests a resistance to fixed typologies, yet also risks privileging concept over functional resilience. Ultimately, the exhibition reinforces an architectural ambition where objects become laboratories for testing material expression, sustainability, and spatial thinking beyond conventional building scales.
