Young & Ayata, a Brooklyn-based design office co-founded by Assistant Professor Michael Young, has received a 2021 AIANY Design Award for its recently completed DL1310 Apartments in Mexico City. Developed in partnership with a local collaborating firm, Michan Architecture, the project is a four-story multifamily building with seven one-to-two bedroom apartments above a basement parking garage. The client’s desire to maximize the building’s footprint and height prompted the designers to focus on its apertures: 

"In order to allow light, view, and ventilation to all sides of the building, a scheme was developed to manipulate the windows into something familiar yet subtly strange. The rectangular windows are rotated into the building’s facade, resulting in two ruled surfaces at the top and bottom and transforming the window into an inverted trapezoidal bay. As the windows rotate in, the slabs appear to pull at the head and sill. This results in a facade that is both extremely blunt in its flatness and is also a dynamic bas-relief of smooth, undulating shadows. These windows also produced different interior moments as the shifting facade met the standardized unit layout. Views out from the interior became small events of forced oblique perspective as one looked both out and down the street at the same time, making each unit unique as it approached the enclosure."

Linking his design practice with his teaching, Young notes of the project: "In the fall of 2016, the third-year design studio at Cooper had the opportunity to travel to Mexico City. There we saw firsthand the incredible craft of concrete construction in Mexico, the boldness of an approach to architectural abstraction, and the subtle sophistication of curving ruled surfaces, such as those built by Felix Candela. With the DL1310 apartment building, we wanted to pay homage to these traditions while acknowledging contemporary digital design methods."

The DL1310 Apartments project also received a P/A Award and was featured in Metropolis Magazine and ICON. 











Photographs by Raphael Gamo.