COCCO

COCCO Arquitectos is an architecture firm based in Guadalajara, Mexico. Founded in 2015 by the architect couple Arcelia Cornejo & Salvador Covarrubias. It is made up of a highly multidisciplinary team of creative professionals. The team includes architects, engineers, interior designers, urban planners, landscape architects, and architectural technicians. Whose philosophy of democratic design is carried out in each project.

Discovering unexpected solutions for specific aspects of the program and context is the most important challenge in all of our tasks. Each design is considered in terms of its cultural environment, place and time. As such, COCCO treats each project as a unique design statement embedded in context and orchestrated specifically for the people who use it.

Concerned not with focus on form, but with process, consultation, context, urban scale, and integrated sustainable design strategies. The signature of COCCO's design cannot be found in form, but in attitude. A people-centered attitude.

With contextualism as one of our strengths, we learn from the cultural context where our projects take place, and we use those lessons to create unique designs; this is built into our philosophy. We believe that this makes us different from other offices and gives added value for future clients.

Designing primarily for People, building spaces that are relevant to the place, and forging connections that give a building purpose have remained consistent, values underlying COCCO's practice since its founding. It interweaves the social, technical, playful and human aspects of space creation to create a unique solution for each architectural challenge. We have put all our efforts into each project to minimize the impact on the natural environment.

We combine the disciplines of architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture in a non-traditional way, with a deep sensitivity for light and beauty. His use of materials, often contrasting in complementary ways, is the sum total of our creative expression.

Arch. Arcelia Cornejo

Born in 1985
Graduated as an Architect in 2011 from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO) University in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Architect Salvador Covarrubias

Born in 1984
Graduated as an Architect in 2009 from the University Center of Art, Architecture and Design of the University of Guadalajara (UDG), Mexico.

Love of nature:

Nature has an irreplaceable value and beauty, many colors, materials and textures. We want to take advantage of the wealth of water, skies, trees and leaves, grass, stones and rocks. I use materials such as wood, earth, adobe, copper, concrete, glass and steel in compositions full of contrasts. Natural light is the most luxurious material, but since it is inexpensive it is often underestimated, we seek the maximum benefit from such an important and rich natural asset.

Collective responsibility for sustainability:

Collective responsibility for land management must be extended to collective responsibility for the sustainability of how the country is managed. After all, that is also a question of survival for all of us.

Cooperation as a challenge:

Interesting developments in architecture are produced by those who manage to create the freedom to experiment and work together within the fragmented practice of design and construction. As a result of changes in design assignments, architects increasingly practice their profession in collaboration with other disciplines. This means experimenting with programs, constructions and materials combined, but emphatically without losing the role and responsibility of the architect.

Director and scriptwriter:

Van Nelle's factory, Rietveld Schröder's house and Villa Mairea are traditional examples of innovative architecture that result from an inspiring client-architect relationship.

Times have changed and commission placement has become more diffuse, consisting of forms of partnership between government, property developers, investors and consumers.

The architect no longer supplies the design alone. The architect plays the role of director and screenwriter in a more hybrid process. The architect tries to discover what the client really wants through ideas, images, atmospheres, models and drawings.

Planning wealth:

It is as if we have forgotten the wealth of urban planning possibilities for housing. The house with a garden and a car in front seems to be the greatest asset on earth right now. Society is made up of very diverse types of family and an aging population, and it is multicultural.

The ever-expanding potential of technology, communication and services will become part of new ideas about housing and care and also about homes for work and recreation.

The acquisition of mobility, the automobile, requires integration into new urban planning typologies without dominating or interrupting public space. We must design buildings and houses that can withstand great changes in use and beauty.

Composition of empty space:

There are no rules for composing. Space, or rather empty space, is an essential part of composition, rhythm and elegance. The space between contrasting shapes, round and square, long and short, large and small, highlights each shape, and this is also true in architecture.

You can try to analyze everything, but a lot is just a matter of intuition. The combination of analysis with intuition is worth its weight in gold for architecture.

Architecture must appeal to all the senses and is never just a purely intellectual, conceptual or visual game. Architecture consists of combining all the individual elements in a single concept. What counts is the arrangement of form and emotion.

Handwriting and language:

The discussion of style is interesting, but not essential in the long run. The beauty of the project lies in the combination of introvert and extrovert, heavy and light, tactile and abstract. Style is an outdated phenomenon. Architecture needs handwriting that can be written in different languages in order to respond appropriately to each location and task.

Architecture is not just a treatise on beauty, since beauty is subjective and depends more on the observer than on the creator, for us architecture more than beautiful must be interesting, since being interesting, it will be for any observer.