Mineral de Pozos

In Mineral de Pozos, an old mining town of Guanajuato, the project rethinks the relationship between matter, gesture and transmission. A trades school is organised around a brick kiln — both instrument and symbol of a craft to be perpetuated.

The kiln at the heart of learning.

The brick kiln is not an ancillary piece of equipment: it is the centre of the device. The school is composed around it — modelling workshops, drying rooms, collective spaces — and the rhythm of the fire structures the rhythm of training. Building the school with the bricks fired on site: pedagogy becomes matter, matter becomes pedagogy.

Firing the brick on the site, using it to build the school that will train tomorrow's brickmakers — the project closes the loop.

A mining geography, a craft to transmit.

Mineral de Pozos has lived from its subsoil for four centuries: silver, mercury, and today, fired earth. The project inscribes the school in this geography — oriented toward the former haciendas de beneficio, open to the dry desert winds. It proposes an architecture that extends the mineral gestures of the place without museumising them: a living tool, functional, transmissible.