Tatiana Bilbao: 2022 Richard Neutra Award for Professional Excellence

The students and faculty of Cal Poly Pomona Architecture are delighted to recognize Tatiana Bilbao’s work as an architect and as an advocate for people, with the 2022 Richard Neutra Award for Professional Excellence.

Bilbao and her Mexico City-based Architecture Studio, was founded in 2004. Tatiana, was born in Mexico City into a family of architects. She earned her Architecture and Urbanism degree in 1996 at Universidad Iberoamericana. Bilbao has been a visiting Professor at Yale University School of Architecture, taught at Harvard University GSD, AA Association in London, Columbia University GSAPP, Rice University, University of Andrés Bello in Chile, and Peter Behrens School of Arts at HS Dusseldorf in Germany. Tatiana Bilbao is the recipient of numerous awards in the areas of housing and sustainable development. In 2020 she was awarded the Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal. 

With California buckling under a lack of affordable housing, and an exploding homeless population, Tatiana comes to CPPARC at an interesting time. Her thoughtful and comprehensive research and ideas about house and housing development seek to solve many far-ranging issues with “House”. Tatiana also takes the position that the quality of life a house affords is more valuable than its financial structure and resale value; and ultimately housing is a fundamental human right. 

In her Columbia University lecture, documented in “A House is Not Just a House,” we read Bilbao's clearly stated positions on the value of space in “house”, the connection between the inside and out, the significance of the immediate setting, and of the larger development context of services and infrastructure. She also asserts the value of local social and cultural traditions including the use of locally sourced and affordable materials, the use of which inform, form and shape architectures. She also uses example that suggest the role of house for accommodating dreams and aspirations of its occupants with flexibility, growth, and personalization; because, finally, people matter and people make their homes, and from this, architects can also learn. 

Armed with this set of values Bilbao has stepped up to confront the politics of development in Mexico and offered solutions for Mexico's social housing problem that have since been implemented.  

Tatiana Bilbao Studio is taking on larger contracts with a greater international profile. And while Bilbao Studio speaks to big-picture issues with housing, the gem in the studio’s work is the unspoken commitment to poetry, such that social housing is designed with fundamental architectural qualities, evidenced in the way spaces are shaped and interfaced within a building and beyond to the building setting; the leveraging of textures and materials qualities to make spaces , and the delightful attention to how those materials, and apertures accent the “house/home” with natural light and shadow play. 

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Note: after 2 years' operating mostly online, and conducting celebratory events in virtual space, the 2022 Neutra Award returned to in-person, and for first time the event is adjacent to significant Neutra designed structures at the Christ Cathedral campus (formerly known as the Crystal Cathedral campus) - special thanks to the Diocese of Orange.