Fábrica de Hielo Garden

This is a post-industrial rewilding project for JSA’s new office space and foundation - Fabrica de Hielo. It occupies the formerly impermeable maneuvering yard of its namesake - a repurposed ice factory in Atlampa, Mexico City.

Tepetl, together with Genfor Landscaping (renowned horticultural consultant - nursery), designed a highland garden of trees, wildflowers, shrubs, and grasses that resembles edge habitat conditions once common in this forested and lacustrine region. The garden acts as an absorption well for the adjacent hardscapes, roofs, and remediated water from the repurposed ice factory. This aids on-site water remediation and infiltration to the shallow aquifer below.

The garden is also part of a sequence of didactic and programmable landscapes within the site that synthesize the forests of the central highlands with a mixture of pines, oaks, and lacustrine trees such as ahuehuetes and ahuexotes. As such, these landscapes accommodate multiple activities and elucidate the environmental services of a garden designed to be ecologically functional.

This re-wilded ecology is particular to the Mexican Neovolcanic corridor, located in the central region of the country, a temperate volcanic plateau with fertile soils and great biodiversity. More than 40 million people live here, consolidating the most important urban corridor in Mexico.

In a zone teeming with fallow plots and abandoned factories, multiple species of bees, hummingbirds, lizards, and other creatures have quickly made this garden their home.