Excess & Experiments: Our Manifesto - part 2
We look to the margins: Self-builders and amateurs who follow their own rules of taste and construction are our teachers. We learn from the extravagant, the idiosyncratic, the feral, the totally untamed.
We let loose: We push designs too far. We reuse, recombine, experiment. We work with our hands and with machines, physically and digitally, and don’t treat those as opposites. We follow intuition, and refine it through iterations.
We learn from each other: We provoke, exchange and collaborate. We build at 1:1.
We celebrate each other’s work! Because excess and experiments is not just a methodology.
Excess is joy.
#PopularArchitecture #Ornamentation #SelfBuilt #ExcessAndExperiments #ArchitecturePhilosophy #MexicoCity #AAVisitingSchool #CriticalPractice #ArchitecturalThought
Excess & Experiments: A Manifesto
1. Excess
We believe in excess: Not as waste, but as resistance. As a celebration of the life people actually live, the way they actually build, the culture they actually inhabit in Mexico City, with a fearlessness in building that contemporary architecture has forgotten.
We are not afraid of ornament: We embrace texture, colour, and mixing them all up together. Ornament is not only decoration. It is identity and craft. It is a language that starts from our bodies and translates into the fabric of what we build.
The performance of a structure is not the whole of architecture and ornament can go further than just building physics, by carrying memories, desire, and belonging.
Photo taken in the Museum of the Meso-American Genome, Mexico City
#ExcessAsResistance #OrnamentIsIdentity #MexicoCityArchitecture #AntiMinimalism #MaximalistDesign #AAVisitingSchool #ArchitectureSchool
It was an amazing experience to visit @greatdixterofficial gardens in May. Its reputation preceded it, but I was still surprised and blown away.
It is a very immersive experience in which the house extension by Lutyens is only the stooge to the gardens. It feels like moving through impressionist paintings made up of splashes of colours and a wide variety of fresh green textures which fade and spread through the landscape. The gardens were designed for the house, but now the house is just like a folly in the gardens.
The gardens are not huge and so one can imagine this type of planting in much smaller spaces. Why have a lawn when you can just fill the space with plants of all sorts? The gardens were inspiring because of the great density of the planting, which feels both controlled and restrained in formal hedges and topiary, while bursting at these edges - spilling over the sometimes very narrow pathways.
While the planting feels feral and profuse, the gardeners there also create wonderfully square and structured compost piles with what looked like nasturtium (mom's cress) growing from the top and sides.
And there was also an espalier fig tree, which I had never see before!
Week 2 of Excess & Experiments: the chapels go up!
After a week of site visits and workshops across Mexico City, it is time to build.
Working with materials at 1:1 scale.
Improvisation and collaboration.
Every chapel is different... what will yours look like?
Mexico City · July 2026 · Link in bio
#ExcessAndExperiments #TinyChapels #LearningByMaking #MexicoCity #CDMX #Building #HandsOnArchitecture #AAVisitingSchool #architectureschool
Swipe to see what our tiny chapels are made of →
Found materials, industrial surfaces, reused objects from Zyanya's collection: the ‘toy store’. @zy
Each chapel we make in Excess & Experiments is different because each designer has spent a week absorbing a different Mexico City. Ever material reused is a choice, according to taste, experimentation and position.
What would you use?
#MaterialCulture #TinyChapels #ArchitecturalDetail #ExcessAndExperiments #ArchitectureMakes Ornamentation Zyanya MexicoCity AAVisitingSchool
Tiny chapels are everywhere in Mexico City.
On street corners, pavements, trees and restaurants. They are built by residents.. not architects. Each one is different, and each one is also cared for.
During the AA Visiting School - Excess & Experiments, we explore unusual and extreme architectural examples of expressions of popular culture in Mexico. Inspired by these, we then build our own tiny chapels.
What makes it a chapel? What makes it yours? You will answer these questions in your own way, learning from Mexico City and each other's references.
The pictures show photos of tiny chapels found on the streets of Mexico City @tidepeca , alternating with examples designed and made during the course in 2025.
📅 July 20–31, 2026 · Applications open · Link in bio
#TinyChapels #Capillita #StreetArchitecture #PopularArchitecture #CDMX #SelfBuilt #UrbanArchitecture #MexicoCity #ExcessAndExperiments #AAVisitingSchool
What are tiny chapels?
They may be the most honest buildings in Mexico City... For years, our programme head @soutonco has archived and studied these street-level sanctuaries @tidepeca and will open his expert knowledge to us.
No one commissioned them, no architect designed them: they were built by residents (sometimes overnight) to mark an event, protect a corner, honour a saint, or simply claim a piece of the street.
They come in every material, every shape and decorative finish. Some are the size of a shoebox. Some are large enough to stand in. They represent how people perceive architecture in their city.
This is the typology at the centre of our visiting school Excess & Experiments. We study them across the city, and we the. build our own.
📅 July 20–31, 2026
🔗 Link in bio to apply today.
#TinyChapels #Capillita #MexicoCity #PopularArchitecture #SelfBuilt #StreetArchitecture #ExcessAndExperiments #AAVisitingSchool #VernacularArchitecture #ArchitectureAndBelief #EverydayArchitecture #CDMX #UrbanCulture
How do you design a tiny chapel intuitively? How do you design with informality?
After five days of site visits and discovery (museum of the meso-American genome, Guerrero Chimalli, the MUJAM @streetartmujam , urban walk with @elasuntourbano , work with Geraz Ato) you have to do something with all of it.
We will follow a process of fast, collaborative, and deliberately intuitive design Charette. You will share a model of your first impression from the first week for discussion, and redesign!
The tiny chapel is where your interpretation of Mexico City lands.
#ExcessAndExperiments #DesignProcess #TinyChapels #ArchitectureSchool #CollaborativeDesign #ArchitectureWorkshop #MexicoCity #AAVisitingSchool
After site visits across Mexico City this is what Day 4 looks like.
Hands in plaster. Pigments. Paint. A mould. Quick decisions and experimentation.
The tile you make here is the beginning of the design language that becomes a tiny chapel.
Excess & Experiments · Mexico City · July 20–31, 2026 · Link in bio
#AAVisitingSchool #ExcessAndExperiments #PlasterWork #ArchitecturalCraft #LearningByMaking #MexicoCity #CDMX #ArchitectureReel
Another one from my archive. An LFA competition entry from 5 years ago: The Serpentine Island.
Just like the island on the Serpentine is one the rare places in central London where human beings cannot interfere with nature, this proposal, the Serpentine Island, puts a small piece of nature out of reach from human beings. It is imagined to be colonised little by little by pioneering plants, and left to evolve.
The structure, shape and concept of the project reference the structurally efficient crinkle crankle walls of 18th century English landscape design, and the Derborencence Island that gardener Gilles Clément created in Euralille, which is accessed and studied only once a year by scientists.
@steevieweevy helped me design a very efficient and cheap structure made out of timber milling rejects, or scaffold planks tied to two steel angles. The proposal is modular, and can be shortened or extended, to create an archipelago of tiny pieces of nature.
Because the plants are kept out of reach by design, the installation requires no watering or maintenance. Hardy, locally native species fill a 1–1.5m deep planter, deep enough to retain sufficient rainwater to sustain itself entirely.
Looking back at it, I couldn’t help but playing with Gemini to create an ‘architectural render’ of the project, contrasting with a finely carved Portland stone building.
1: original sketch of top view of the planter/bench
2: new sketches of differently shaped islands
3: Gilles Clement, île Derborence
4, new Gemini AI Render of the project
#SerpentineIsland #CrinkleCrankle #ArchitectureCompetition #ThirdLandscape #ArchitectureDesign
What happens on Day 4 of Excess & Experiments?
After visits and discoveries, we are back in the workshop. Everyone makes a decorative plaster tile. Each tile is a small argument about what ornament can be: what motifs it uses, whose visual languages it draws from, what it wants to say.
We carve and press clay, cast and paint plaster. This is the moment the course shifts gear. You stop looking at how ornament is made and start understanding by making, dealing hands on with the material.
This summer, you make one too → swipe to see the mould, then tiles being installed at the Museum of the Meso-American Genome
📅 July 20-31, 2026 · Applications open · Link in bio
#PlasterWork #Ornamentation #HandsOnLearning #ArchitectureStudents #MexicoCity #AAVisitingSchool
