Before becoming a contemporary art agency, the space now occupied by PARA A was a home, a studio, and possibly a decisive condition for creation: the former studio of painter Juan Soriano. Founded and directed by Verónica Fernández in 2023, PARA A is an art agency and a space dedicated to contemporary art in Mexico City, located at number 38 Plaza Melchor Ocampo within the so-called Edificio para Artistas, designed between 1939 and 1941 by Luis Barragán and Max Cetto. The agency reactivates the double-height rooms, mezzanines, terraces, and large steel-framed windows that once supported Soriano’s work, in an apartment that today serves as both Fernández’s residence and the home of PARA A.
PARA A at Edificio para Artistas Technical Information
- ArchitectsLuis Barragán and Max Cetto
- LocationPlaza Melchor Ocampo 38, Mexico City, Mexico
- Project Years1939 – 1941
- Photographs© Sergio López, © Armando Juárez, © Rodrigo Moya
The apartment was conceived as an architecture capable of housing life and, at the same time, making creation possible.
– Luis Barragan and Max Cetto
A Modernist Laboratory at Plaza Melchor Ocampo
Designed between 1939 and 1941, Edificio para Artistas belongs to a consequential period in the formation of Mexican modern architecture. Luis Barragán had recently established himself in Mexico City and was recalibrating the regional vocabulary of his earlier work in Guadalajara. Max Cetto, who had arrived from Europe in 1938, brought experience shaped by the German Modern Movement and its interest in rational planning, daylight, and compact dwelling. Their collaboration produces a building that is functionalist in its organization while resisting the reduction of domestic life to efficient enclosure.
The project is situated within a notable group of residential experiments around Plaza Melchor Ocampo. Buildings by Jose Luis Creixell, Augusto H. Alvarez, Juan Sordo Madaleno, and Enrique del Moral transformed the plaza’s perimeter in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Read together, these works register a shift toward greater urban density without abandoning access to air, planted outlooks, and exterior space. Edificio para Artistas participates in this collective urban proposition through its street-facing studio windows, roof terrace, and direct visual connection to the plaza’s trees.
Its program was unusually explicit for its time. Rather than treating artistic labor as an activity accommodated after occupation, the building was designed for artists, architects, and designers from the outset. The compact apartment became a hybrid type in which habitation, production, storage, display, and informal gathering could overlap. This live-work premise gave the building a social role beyond conventional rental housing, creating a framework in which cultural work could remain embedded in the city’s daily rhythms.
The Spatial Framework of the Artist Studio
The defining condition of the apartments is sectional rather than planimetric. A double-height principal room establishes an expansive vertical field for work and gathering, while the mezzanine, stair, and circulation zones condense domestic functions into a smaller volume. This alternation between compression and release gives the units a spatial complexity disproportionate to their footprint. The interior is not organized as a sequence of isolated rooms, but as a continuous visual field in which upper and lower levels remain in contact.
Large, steel-framed windows form the principal interface between studio and city. Their regular grids introduce a measured order into the tall interior walls while admitting diffuse daylight from the plaza. Tree canopy enters the visual life of the rooms, tempering the hard geometry of the steel divisions and making seasonal change perceptible from within. The windows also expose the internal scale of the studios on the facade, distinguishing the building from neighboring apartments whose domestic organization remains more concealed.
A compact white spiral stair rises around a slender central core, linking the main room with the sleeping level without consuming the floor area required for work. Pine flooring, skirtings, shelves, and mezzanine caps introduce a warm, tactile counterpoint to the white plaster surfaces and gray stair treads. Brick fireplaces anchor the principal rooms at a domestic scale, while the terraces extend habitation upward toward the roof. These elements avoid a strict separation between living and making: the fireplace, dining table, bookshelves, painting wall, and stair occupy the same spatial register.
Architecture as a Condition for Artistic Production
Juan Soriano’s former studio offers a precise case for considering architecture as a condition of artistic production rather than a neutral setting. Archival photographs show the artist working against the tall studio wall, placing canvases within a room whose vertical dimension exceeded that of an ordinary domestic interior. The wall became a surface for making and viewing, but also a datum against which the proportions of paintings could be judged. Its height allowed works of elongated format to be handled at a scale that a lower room would have constrained.
In photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, Soriano’s working environment is inseparable from the surrounding architecture. The gridded studio window supplies daylight and establishes a geometric counterpart to the paintings. The brick fireplace, mezzanine edge, bookshelves, and freestanding canvases form a dense domestic field rather than a purpose-built atelier detached from everyday life. A painting could lie flat on the pine floor, sit on an easel near the hearth, or hang high on the wall. Each position required a different bodily relation to the room.
This relationship does not establish a simple causal link between the building and Soriano’s visual language. It does, however, demonstrate how the dimensions and material character of a workplace can expand an artist’s field of operations. The double-height volume made verticality available as an everyday spatial experience; the window grid offered a persistent measure of scale; and the mezzanine allowed the room to be seen from above as well as from the floor. Architecture here shaped the circumstances of attention, production, and display.
Reoccupation, Memory, and a Space for Contemporary Art
PARA A first opened in the apartment that belonged to designer Clara Porset before moving to Juan Soriano’s former studio, where it is located today. Founded in 2023 by Verónica Fernández, who also lives in the apartment, PARA A preserves the building’s original relation between domestic life and cultural production. This reoccupation works best when the inherited features remain legible. Artworks encounter the existing fireplace, the deep timber edge of the mezzanine, the spiral stair, and the full-height window bays rather than being detached from them by a neutral exhibition fit-out. The agency consequently operates within an interior that carries evidence of previous modes of living and making.
The rooms challenge the conventions of the generic white cube. Their walls are white, yet openings, changes in height, stair movement, and domestic fixtures interrupt them. Exhibitions must negotiate a low ceiling beneath the mezzanine before opening toward the double-height wall and window. This sequence makes bodily scale central to the viewing experience. Furniture, installations, textiles, drawings, and paintings can occupy the space as distinct spatial devices, not merely as objects distributed across a uniform enclosure.
Martin Luque’s site-specific lighting installation clarifies this latent sectional structure after dark. Linear light traces the mezzanine edge, ceiling junctions, parapets, and window perimeters, turning the studio interior into a visible diagram from the street. Behind the facade’s stacked steel windows, the interlocking volumes of the apartments become readable as a composition of workspaces and domestic cells. The intervention does not replace the historical architecture with a new image; it makes the building’s existing organization, normally dispersed across rooms and levels, temporarily explicit.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Founder and Director: Verónica Fernández (PARA A, est. 2023)
- Photography: Sergio Lopez, Armando Juarez, Rodrigo Moya, Colita, and unknown photographers
- Site-specific installation: Martin Luque, No estoy convenciendo a nadie, 2025
- Press: Monica Arellano RP and Camilo Báez Medina
- Publications: Juan Soriano: Retratos y Esculturas, Grupo Azabache, 1991
- Publications: Juan Soriano, el poeta pintor. Pintura, teatro, escultura
