Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO: Research Center of the Sea of Cortez

Tatiana Bilbao’s work explores fundamental human needs. The slow drawings and the hand facture of the models change the architecture. This sense of becoming through time is then embedded in the architectural work. Tatiana's collages create visual narratives that evoke a memory or an imagined world where her values are held.

The architecture of the Sea of Cortez Research Center fully demonstrates her imagination. This project creates a fictional past – and an architecture of ruin is brought into connection with its site and its ecologies. The project cares for aquatic species and the ecosystems in which they reside.

The collages suggest dreamscapes that are made real through a willingness to wait and persevere. These drawings transport us to Mazatlán, Mexico. Their recording transmits an aqueous environment to a terrestrial one - transforming the gallery into an aquarium that reaches past the glass to the outside.

This exhibit focuses on one project of Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO’s: the Sea of Cortez Research Center in Mazatlán, Mexico, 2017 - 2023. The exhibit concept plays with the gallery’s presence on Newbury Street under the overhanging eave. The firm envisioned a long table that appears to extend through the gallery’s glass window, mirroring the project itself. Just as the project connects two worlds, the table plays with this duality, reflecting both spaces through a platform that brings them together.

The placement of two scaled models—one protected within the gallery and the other exposed to the elements—invites viewers to engage with the passage of time. It highlights how environmental factors, human interaction, and the public nature of a space shape the life of an architectural project. Through exposure to weather and use during the exhibit, the outside model gradually becomes a ruin, echoing the narrative of the Sea of Cortez Research Center, which is inspired by a ruin overtaken by floodwaters and an evolving ecosystem.

The table serves as a gathering of the studio’s analogue processes that lead to such deeply experienced and inhabited spaces. The collages are framed, the sketched drawings are printed on vellum, and the photographs are on paper distinguishing the phases of conceiving this project.

The walls of the McCormick Gallery present immersive, site-specific hand drawings that invite visitors to fully engage with the project on display, reflecting Tatiana Bilbao Studio's analogue approach. Students and faculty from the BAC helped bring this vision to life.