Andrea Soto
Biography
Andrea Soto is an architect based in Guadalajara, México and co-founder, with Alejandro Guerrero, of Atelier ARS. Guerrero and Soto have been working together since 2010. Soto won the CEMEX Architect Marcelo Zambrano Scholarship which supported her studies for the Master in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, graduating with an American Society of Landscape Architects ASLA distinction in 2017. She also graduated from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO) in Guadalajara, México. She joins the UVA School of Architecture as the Visiting Shure Professor in Architecture.
Together, Guerrero and Soto have received the Emerging Voices award, given by The Architectural League of New York and the Design Vanguard from Architectural Record magazine, both in 2015. Their work has been nominated for the Mies Crown Hall America’s Prize, granted by the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and has been a finalist in the Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism Biennial in Sao Paulo, Brazil. They have been lecturers at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard through the Latin GSD cycle, Boston Architectural College, as well as UBC SALA, and UVA.
Some of their work became part of the Official Exhibition of Mexico’s Pavilion at the Architecture Venice Biennial in 2014, 2016 and 2018. They obtained a Silver Medal in the XV Mexican Architecture Biennial and they were finalists in the Emerging Architects prize from the Architectural Review magazine in 2018. They received 1st prize at the III Latin American Biennial of Landscape Architecture. In 2019 as part of the event Mantovarchitettura 2019, they participated as lecturers and their work was presented in the international exhibition “Diseñando México” of the Milan Polytechnic, Polo Territorial di Mantova, in collaboration with CASABELLA.
They have developed over many years, academic activities that promote the exchange of architectural culture through courses and seminars on topics of theory and history with Universities and NGOs. As a result of such academic work, the book Arquitecturas del Fuego I y II was written by Alejandro Guerrero in 2020, a theoretical framework that accounts for the interest of our office regarding history, architecture and landscape issues.
The dialectic between architecture and landscape has been a key subject in their work, as they have been interested for a long time in the possibility of blurring those disciplinary limits, to find new ways of expression for Atelier ARS. Instead of understanding architecture and landscape as two different professional activities, they have tried to research the possibilities of crossing information that can lead to a better understanding of the creation of human habitats.
