Engineered Geologies
Year
Exhibited at
Sponsor
Design Team
2025
Bienal de Arquitectura de Nuevo León
Versitalia
Enrique Ibarra
This project reproduces, at scale, the entrance to La Huasteca.
A scale of size, but also of time.
The process that formed this natural canyon, located west of the city of Monterrey, began 150 million years ago.
The fabrication of this piece took 460 days.
Its temporal scale follows a ratio of 1 : 576,923,077.
The formation of La Huasteca begins with layers of compacted limestone that, due to the movement of tectonic plates, fold and transform what was once horizontal into a vertical surface. Over the course of millions of years, hydraulic erosion gradually carves the rock, opening canyons that reveal the persistent trace of water and produce the monumental landscapes we recognize today.
This piece reenacts these natural processes through artificial means. The engineered or sintered stone from which it is made is formed by compacting matter and subjecting it to forces that imitate the pressures that once shaped mountains. An accelerated, directed, fabricated geology. Once solidified, the stone can be raised as a rigid plate. Erosion is then reproduced using a waterjet cutter, which replicates the action of the Santa Catarina River on the rock formations of La Huasteca. In this way, the work not only reproduces the original form at scale (1:500), but also its formative processes, compressing geological time into human temporalities.
The correspondences are evident: layers, folds, verticality, erosion. Nature and industry operate according to different logics, yet they generate forms that are strikingly close. Within this dialogue, the piece situates itself between site and non-site: a fragment displaced, abstracted, and reconstructed far from its original geology, yet maintaining with it a formal, formative, and conceptual relationship.
Today, we speak of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, in which human activity has had a significant impact on the configuration of the planet. We have refined our capacity to replicate, accelerate, or replace processes that were once exclusively natural. We manufacture geology. We edit the landscape. As we alter the geological history of territories through extraction and other human actions, we also reproduce it at another scale through industrial processes. It is through this operation that we reveal not only our ability to transform matter, but also the urgent need to reconsider our relationship with it.