Each year, TIME publishes TIME100 Next, a list, inspired by its flagship TIME100, seeking to recognize 100 people from all industries around the world whose careers are on the rise. As a result, the 2022 TIME100 Next list features high-profile musicians and medical professionals, government officials, movement leaders and whistleblowers along with top CEOs, all selected by TIME journalists. However, in this year's list it is possible to recognize the only professional that represents the guild: the Mexican architect Frida Escobedo.
Frida Escobedo is an architect with the spirit of a deep thinker and a sensitive artist. Her art is driven by a wonderful mixture of creative exploration, critical thinking, and an extensive cultural background that she masterfully puts in dialogue with contrasting contexts in subtle and brilliant ways. Far from the architecture obsessed with signature, Frida seems more interested in the ways architecture is intertwined with everyday issues and can ultimately transform social relations by encouraging community. A poised creator, her work is both stunning and discreet. After a series of extraordinary public projects, including the 2018 Serpentine Galleries Pavilion, and La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Mexico—there, she turned an artist’s studio into a complex with a museum, workshop, and artist’s residency, adding perforated concrete walls and rotating huge murals so they frame a courtyard and invite the public in—Frida was recently appointed to design the new wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a Mexican woman and as her friend, I couldn’t be prouder of her passionate and consistent work on new ways of understanding architecture.
- Gabriela Camara for TIME.
To see the full list visit TIME100.
