Alberto Kalach is one of the most talented architects working in Mexico City today. What makes the simple beauty of the work he has created with partner Daniel Alvarez especially remarkable is that it has managed to escape from a traditional dilemma for the city. In addition to serving the state and private business-the former demanding overblown monumentality, the latter seeking copies of what is already known and can be easily produced-the discipline of design also struggles with the burden of definition peculiar to Mexico, a nation colonized longer than most others in the Western Hemisphere.

At the urban scale, Kalach and Alvarez derive their basic vocabulary from the tradition of Corbusian and Russian constructivist slabs that, during the last two decades, were infused with a sense of memory and influenced by Italian and Spanish rationalists. At a smaller scale, Kalach and Alvarez are members of a generation of designers who use concrete, glass, and steel as a palette with which they create extremely active three-dimensional compositions.