“Horizontal vertigo” and the architecture of Pato

by Ambika Subra.

Juan Villoro now famously referred to Mexico City as a “horizontal vertigo” - a place that unfolds not upward but outward, a labyrinth of nonlinear, magical chaos. To live here is to get lost and found in equal measure. It’s a city where a last-minute lunch can shift your day, where you might follow a stranger into a new neighborhood and come out with a lifelong friend, or find yourself questioning everything because of a particular alleyway.

It was in this horizontal vertigo that I found myself having dinner with a close friend and renowned architect: Patricio “Pato” Galindo Chain.

To understand Pato's architecture is to understand how he inhabits his city. His work - spanning from the boutique Hotel Dama in Mexico City to the retreat Mi Cielo in Valle de Bravo - rarely announces itself with grandiosity. Instead, it collaborates with history, with time, with those who move through it. His motto: “Architecture is precisely the construction of a space by inhabiting it.”