What it had to solve
Design a temporary intervention for CUBO MEM, a 6x6x6m red PTR steel skeleton erected in the late twentieth century at ITESO to host student installations, whose role had been eclipsed by campus routine.
The idea
Instead of adding an object, they clad three faces of the existing 6m frame in flexing mirror acrylic so the campus reflects as a blurred, unreadable sfumato field.
How it works
Mirror acrylic panels on galvanized-profile frames cover three faces, with black shade mesh, gravel and timber inside; the flexing panels fragment reflections of trees, paths and red steel stairways, shifting with Guadalajara's rainy-season light.
What it did
No visitor numbers are given; the intervention returned the overlooked frame to attention and made perception the medium — passersby must separate the reflected campus from the volume receiving it.
Background
At ITESO in Tlaquepaque, Mexico, architects Fernando Hernandez, Humberto Espinoza and Jessica Corona took CUBO MEM — a red-painted 6x6x6m PTR steel skeleton built in the late twentieth century to support temporary student installations — that had quietly become part of the campus background, and made it the subject rather than the problem. Their 36-square-metre temporary intervention, documented by ArchEyes in October 2026, adds no new object: it re-clothes the existing frame.
Three faces are clad in mirror acrylic panels fixed to galvanized-profile frames, arranged on a visible grid so the fabrication logic stays exposed. The acrylic flexes slightly, so instead of a stable glass-mirror image it breaks reflected trees, paths, concrete buildings and the red steel stairways into uneven fragments — the blur that gives the project its name, from sfumato. Black shade mesh, gravel and timber complete the interior, and in Guadalajara's rainy-season light the cube can read as a mass of foliage, dissolving into the pale sky when overcast.
The original structure stays as the support for both cladding and lining: a skeleton designed to host additions is made visually dense, only to reveal unexpected emptiness inside. From the arcades, visitors must distinguish between the campus the pavilion reflects and the volume that receives it — perception itself is the installation's primary medium.
Why it lands
The brief treated the dormant frame as an asset: the cube already had structural capacity and a place in campus memory, so replacing it would have discarded both.
Mirror acrylic was chosen precisely because it is not glass — the flex gives a soft, shifting image that suppresses the frame's usual legibility.
The exposed panel grid and visible fabrication keep the intervention honest: an alteration of a familiar object, not a disguised new building.
Photographs by FARO72 and Jessica Corona show the envelope changing with weather and light, the intended effect rather than a construction flaw.
What you can take
The strongest intervention sometimes adds nothing new — re-skinning a familiar frame so people see it again can be the whole idea.
Since then
The pavilion is a temporary intervention, recorded as a 2026 project with photography by FARO72 and Jessica Corona; ArchEyes published its documentation on 9 October 2026. The material records no dates for dismantling and no visitor figures, only the claim that the cube's former visibility is renewed by withholding its outline.
FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE