Fundación Fernando Romero supports arts and culture through its dedication to architectural preservation, design excellence, and expanding access to cultural and educational opportunities. Central to this mission is the transition of La Cuadra San Cristóbal—Luis Barragán’s iconic masterpiece—into a public facing cultural institution opening Fall 2025. This initiative not only preserves Barragán’s architectural legacy but also reimagines the site as a cultural campus focused on the dynamic interplay between art and architecture.

Launching this Fall, the La Cuadra Prize will celebrate creative excellence across disciplines, recognizing visionary practitioners whose work redefines the boundaries of architecture, art, and design. Situated within Mexico’s vibrant cultural landscape, the Prize will amplify voices from around the world whose innovations provide new ways ofseeing, making, and thinking.

Additionally, the Fundación stewards Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura, a collection founded by Fernando Romero in 2012 featuring over 1,300 objects by Mexican and international designers. With plans to present Archivo at La Cuadra’s campus, the collection will be positioned as a platform for education, cultural exchange, and dialogue, linking Mexico’s design heritage with global practices. Through curating an accessible and collaborative collection, Archivo offers a deeper understanding of design’s impact on society and enriches everyday life.

Framed by the timelessness of Barragán’s masterpiece, the cultural institute becomes a space for exchange and possibility, inviting the public to be inspired by the ways creativity transforms our relationship to the world and our future.

The research institute investigates today’s most pressing global challenges through the theory and practice of architecture. By conducting in depth and interdisciplinary research, the Institute aims to support the development of solutions that cultivate social-spatial justice.

Recognizing the often-hidden yet pervasive power of architecture in advancing political, economic and social agendas—determining who has access to spaces, resources, and opportunities—the institute repositions spatial design as a tool for equity, working to counter architecture’s historical entanglement with systems of exclusion and control while reimagining the boundaries and scope of the discipline.

The Institute seeks to bridge conceptual inquiry with real-world applications,developing interventions that range from policy frameworks to design strategies. Based in the Americas and to be led by a multidisciplinary team of researchers and spatial practitioners, it integrates technical expertise, conceptual inquiry, and practical design to address complex territorial and spatial challenges holistically.

The institute’s inaugural project will be dedicated to empowering migrant and diasporic communities across Mexico’s borderlands through spatial research and infrastructural interventions. Mexico’s northern border with the UnitedStates—as documented in Hyperborder(2007)—epitomizes the complexities and inequalities of migration. In central Mexico, the border dynamic shifts as transit routes become key nodes of movement and control. Similarly, Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala has increasingly serves as a militarized frontline of migration enforcement.

Employing spatial methodologies—including critical cartography, archival research, and community engagement—the project will reframe migration and its transitory spaces as a universal human experience, rooted in humanity’s intrinsic desire for both stability and mobility. By situating migration within global networks of displacement and belonging, the project aims to challenges divisive narratives, amplify migrant agency, and reimagines shared futures that redefine ways of building and coexisting.