Frida Escobedo

Frida Escobedo is busy. While the pandemic slowed things down a bit for her and her Mexico City practice, also coinciding with a break from academic teaching, business is now picking up again. She currently has some 15 projects on the go, is about to travel to Europe to meet a client, and has been knee-deep prepping for a new design workshop she is about to lead at the Yale School of Architecture, kicking off in spring 2022. It is a stage of intense research and preparation, an incredibly demanding and rich period in an architect’s creative process that often remains unseen.

While disclosing competition wins and celebrating high profile completions with sleek, immaculate photography feels central to the day-to-day of architecture practice, these are only short moments in the daily operations of a busy office and reveal little of the highly involved process of building design. Most of the time is spent in quiet preparation – or frenzied drafting – with little output that is visible to the outside world. Escobedo is exactly in this ‘black box’ phase of architectural production, where her 17-strong practice is frenetically producing, all guns blazing, but it will be at least another year before the results of the next ‘big one’ reach the public. Smaller scale works keep trickling through in between. Projects such as the