Casa Wabi, a nonprofit arts center located in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico, is a stage for world-renowned contemporary artists and architects to engage with the local community.

Tadao Ando's remarkable Casa Wabi dots the Pacific coastline of Mexico with structures by Alberto Kalach, Alvaro Siza, Kengo Kuma, Gloria Cabral, Solano Benitez, Jorge Ambrosi, and Gabriela Etchegaray. Founded in 2013 by renowned Mexican artist Bosco Sodi, it combines artist residencies, a gallery, and living quarters with classrooms, gardens, and public space.

Tadao Ando centers the foundation on a 312-meter-long wall; his trademark concrete structures radiate off it, capped in woven palm tree leaves for ventilation. These local palapa-style roofs are often the only element distinguishing indoor and outdoor spaces, an effect complemented by wooden shutters in place of paned glass windows. Other unusual native building materials include Mexican parota wood and marmolina.

Led by director Carla Sodi, Casa Wabi challenges architects and artists to contemplate nature deeply, as it provides new tools for area residents. Casa Wabi is both a world-class architectural destination and a model for new strategies of creative intervention within economically depressed communities.

About the Authors:

Martino Stierli is the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art and the SNF Professor of the History of Architecture at the University of Zurich.
Dakin Hart is Senior Curator at the Noguchi Museum, Queens, New York.
Tadao Ando is a Japanese self-taught architect whose approach to architecture and landscape was categorized by architectural historian Francesco Dal Co as "critical regionalism". He is the winner of the 1995 Pritzker Prize.
One of the most highly regarded architects of his generation, Portugese architect Álvaro Siza is known for his sculptural works that have been described as "poetic modernism." He was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1992.
Bosco Sodi is a contemporary artist based in New York City. Sodi has lived, studied, and worked in Paris, Barcelona, and Berlin. He now maintains studios in Barcelona, Berlin, New York, and his native Mexico City.
Carla Sodi is the general director of Casa Wabi, where she oversees an international exhibition program, residencies in Oaxaca and Japan, and education programs ranging from clay, recycling, conservation, drawing to film and performance.

In Yugoslavia’s “Third Way” architecture, Brutalism meets the fantastical

Squeezed between the two rival Cold War blocs, Yugoslav architecture consistently adhered to a modernist trajectory. As a founding nation of the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslavia became a major exporter of modernist architecture to Africa and the Middle East in a postcolonial world. By merging a variety of local traditions and contemporary international influences in the context of a unique Yugoslav brand of socialism, often described as the “Third Way,” local architects produced a veritable “parallel universe” of modern architecture during the 45 years of the country’s existence. This remarkable body of work has sparked recurrent international interest, yet a rigorous interpretative study never materialized in the United States until now.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition on the architectural production of Yugoslavia between 1948 and 1980, this is the first publication to showcase an understudied but important body of modernist architecture. Featuring new scholarship and previously unpublished archival materials, this richly illustrated publication sheds light on key ideological concepts of Yugoslav architecture, urbanism and society by delving into the exceptional projects and key figures of the era, among them Bogdan Bogdanovic, Zoran Bojovic, Drago Galic, Janko Konstantinov, Georgi Konstantinovski, Niko Kralj, Boris Magaš, Juraj Neidhardt, Jože Plecnik, Svetlana Kana Radevic, Edvard Ravnikar, Vjenceslav Richter, Milica Šteric, Ivan Štraus and Zlatko Ugljen.