Architectural Digest features Jorge Pardo’s Yucatán oasis in Mérida, Mexico

The artist takes AD inside his Yucatán oasis

By Eve MacSweeney

Jorge Pardo loves to build. And the Cuban-born artist, who divides his time between New York City and Mérida, Mexico, has been doing it a lot lately. This fall he’s put the finishing touches on a sprawling, inventive compound for the publisher Benedikt Taschen in Malibu, and on L’Arlatan, an exuberant hotel in Arles, France, commissioned by the Swiss pharmaceutical heiress and art patron Maja Hoffmann. The hotel takes its place close to Hoffmann’s Luma Arles, a contemporary-art complex adapted by Annabelle Selldorf from a former 19th-century train factory and anchored by Frank Gehry’s spectacular Arts Resource Center, which will be completed in spring 2020.

And then there’s Pardo’s own place, a walled oasis in the Yucatán capital. Mérida, where he set up a studio in 2013, suits the artist’s love of both scale and artisanal workmanship. Here, for example, he can source traditional ceramic tiles, one of his most cherished materials, cut and colored to his limitless, unbridled specifications. 'It’s like a playground for me,' he says.

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Image: © Jason Schmidt