SALA HARS
text —
WILHELMINA MER
images —
SALA HARS via whatsapp
— june, 2026
mexico city / paris
JUAN SALA — We met at Harvard. It is increasingly rare in architecture schools to find someone whose interests align so closely with your own. Doug and I shared a deep commitment to tradition, history, and culture as sources for architectural invention. Architecture, more and more so today — but also eight years ago when Doug and I met, and probably for all of the 21st century — consists of a very diverging set of interests in school. You have architects that are very interested in form-finding through parametricism and digital software. You have architects that are very interested in ecology. There are architects that are interested in codes and city planning. But Doug and I share a more extinct way of seeing architecture — buildings that come from the history of architecture, but that see a reincarnation happening through a process. Form coming from form.
We've always discussed a quote from Borges that says that all you need is two mirrors to create a labyrinth. I don't think we were critical of all of these different movements because I do think they all have value. But we were really much more interested in the idea that in a time when things are moving so rapidly, how do you stop to really reflect? Both to create, and to generate spaces that provide that pause for someone. So it was a more contemplative approach that we both found ourselves in during school. That spirit of two mirrors to create a labyrinth, to create work that is deeply rooted in tradition but at the same time that is indisputably contemporary. So we looked at history with great commitment and passion — meaning antique Japanese architectures, pre-Columbian forms from across the region, European classicism, and also vernacular architectures in all continents, that happen in unexpected and unusual places. We were very interested in the cultural realm of the world.
We used the context of university to test ideas against our peers, our mentors, and a lot of academic scrutiny, until we could form an idea that we felt could be put into the world. An attitude and a creative act of seeing tradition as fueling the fire — not preserving the ashes, as some might propose.
In a way, people trying to discredit us were also backhandedly complimenting us. We like to use that as fuel. Let's take history in a more plastic way — the tropes are there to be studied, analyzed, and used as fodder for contemporary production.
WM — What was your first project that expressed this ethos, and these ideas working together?
JUAN SALA — We would say our thesis back at Harvard, which had at core the idea of trying to reconcile abstraction and figuration in architecture. It gave us the commitment to begin creating hundreds of buildings that are hypothetical, living in our catalog of the imagination or archived as drawings on paper. It was this commitment to architecture as a truly idealized condition — which doesn't mean those buildings live only in the imaginary, because once you have this almost platonic understanding of them and confront them with real parameters, they immediately must transform and change. So there's this duality. Soon after that, perhaps the project that symbolized in a concrete and physical way this conceptual temperament was Sushi Shunei in Paris. A dualism between the possibilities of architecture in their most pure form and really grounding them in a room. That's maybe how we've always approached architecture: both the idealized and the contingent.
JUAN SALA — We were approached by a group of co-founders with a very unique vision: to bring preventive care in an accessible way — both in price and in terms of being in the center of cities, without having to go through a hospital. They wanted to create no friction between wanting to take care of your body and having access to the most innovative, state-of-the-art procedures.
We were lucky to be selected for that journey after a competition. I would say it was a shared vision of creating a non-medical facility. And I think that's maybe why we were invited — in the world today, the people that design a hospital or medical facility are typically people who have designed one before. Of course, that's maybe why they all look the same and all have this repetitive, sterile quality that's alien to what we are as people.
They were visionary in wanting to invite people who had no prior experience with medical facilities, and then build a team to support us with technical consultants. We were invited because of our interest in the history of architecture rather than any expertise in that technical world. It was a fruitful, dynamic process of combining feedback, because once you actually start to design programs like this, you understand how and why they look the way they look. Beds have to be a certain height for doctors to perform examinations. Backrests have to have a certain shape for your body to be in an optimal posture. Rooms need ventilation. Surfaces have to be cleanable. The easy way out is, of course, designing what a conventional facility looks like.
But once you want to integrate design, you have to really wrestle between what is acceptable for both domains. Until what height can doctors still perform an examination? When do you jeopardize the result with a backrest that's more visually appealing but less functionally useful? And it all has to work. That's when architecture really came in. We created a place that really works, and you don't see a single machine.
DOUGLAS HARSEVOORT — It wasn't a top-down imposition on our end — putting things where they wouldn't function. It was rather the other way around: here's exactly what we need to function — now how do we elegantly disguise these things without hindering any functional or technical aspects?
It was about creating negative poché spaces — the hidden spaces you get from putting an elliptical room inside an existing square or rectangular room — so you get these absent corners, these unfilled pockets around the formal gesture of this womb-like cocoon at the center. To infill those corners meant absorbing the functionalities of the room — even the stool for the doctor to sit on. Everything is hidden away.
There was also this desire to mask the changing quality of objects as they age. In a contemporary era of rapid medical development, things update quickly — every six months, a year, two years at most for bigger equipment like MRI machines. Nothing should feel like it has a timestamp, but rather should have an integrated feeling that could have existed ten years ago or twenty years in the future. Using architecture and design to mask the things that give our eye a sense of rapidly aging technology. Even looking at a computer screen from twenty years ago, it feels like a dinosaur.
The whole goal was to mask that. Medical equipment always creates a sense of anxiety — you see a syringe and immediately tense up, you see an ultrasound machine and it comes with all this baggage and connotation. We wanted to eliminate that from the experience and make everything feel familiarly comfortable, and yet unfamiliar in terms of its overall design language.
In Star Wars, it's so seamlessly integrated into the future that it still functions perfectly — whereas in David Lynch’s Dune, and we hate to say anything disparaging about the great David Lynch, but in this film there's a recognizably aging set of equipment and gadgetry that quickly becomes a symbol of past technologies. In Star Wars, it has the same functionality but feels timeless.
JUAN SALA — The Baroque served two pillars of the project. The first: if we wanted to create a preventive medical experience that was truly convincing, where humans were at the center and every hallway was choreographed for comfort, contemplation, and serenity — the period of architecture where you find clues for that kind of journey would be the Baroque. It fulfills many of these aspects and brings a uniqueness and almost an aura to any scale. Some Baroque churches are literally the size of a room and yet have a scale and immensity of their own. They always leave you jaw-dropped and mesmerized.
The Baroque served this commitment to a world where members are at the center, symmetry is a dominant principle, and light and shadow have a kind of synchronicity. It offered elements of compression and decompression, a complement to the journey and to the episodic nature of how a project unfolds. We found cues throughout that period of architecture that were so enriching — a segue to confronting the problem of medicine through an unexpected journey, but one that would end up being both a medical space and something with the feeling of human-centered design you find in churches.
And yet every surface you touch is extremely material. The stones are from Italian and Roman quarries, the plasters are done with Japanese techniques to infuse them with patina and deep care, the woods are all selected with chiaroscuro effect in mind. So it's an interesting dualism between this immaterial world of assembly and this material world of scent and touch. That's how the Baroque worked — using it in a dual way: to create a medical facility through its immaterial quality, and to create a non-medical facility through its human-centered design.
Curves add cost to a project. It's the less intuitive way to make a form that's economically achievable — though we did achieve it here through a lot of mental labor and rethinking. But it's very counter to the medical experience, which is full of rectilinear forms that have no sense of mystery or drama, that just tell you exactly where to go and don't let your eye lead you where you might want to go. The softness of curves and Baroque form help create a sense of wonder and curiosity about the medical experience rather than addressing it in a cold, direct, factual way.
WM — How do you contextualize this project within your broader practice — this approach to human-centered design, but on a much more intimate scale with the emphasis on healing and on closeness to the human form?
DOUGLAS HARSEVOORT — We're always thinking about perception and the human body — how one moves through a space, how you experience changes of light, atmosphere, material, shape, and what space and proportion do to human perception. For example, the entry vestibule of the sake bar in Paris is both inviting and disorienting. We like that quality — being left in a chamber where you're not sure where to go next, a moment of pause that's both serene and confusing. Very deliberate. It takes you out of yourself and puts you into a new world.
Zoī just took all of that to an extreme next level — smells that were contemplated, light levels gradually increasing or decreasing, the stairs, all of it highly calibrated in terms of the sensorial experience from one place to the next. And in terms of the human body — the idea that you would be undressed, essentially — we wanted the spaces to feel open and not intimidating. Not too cave-like, not so you're walking around a corner not knowing who's going to be there. But also not so open that you feel very exposed. Finding a balance between feeling secluded and secure, while still comfortable enough to know what's around the next corner. The sushis were training ground in human perception and experience. Zoī expanded that vocabulary.
JUAN SALA — Portals are an architectural device that's quite encyclopedic. In any culture, you find a portal condition — Japanese ancient architecture, pre-Columbian architectures, classical architectures. There's always this portal quality that brings to a space a sense of procession, a way of making a small space feel very large. The portal has always been, across cultures, a formal solution to various problems — and depending on the project, we've engaged with it differently.
In the Tiempos store in Mexico City, we had a space that was tight on ceiling height and needed a gesture that would circumvent that limitation. We incorporated an elliptical gesture because it pulls you to the sides, so you forget how tightly compressed it is in the vertical plane. But we also had a small footprint in plan, so we used the portal in the layout too — as you go deeper into the project, the portals come closer together, so visually you feel it's deeper than it is.
The portals at Zoī were perhaps more about lowering light and tempering exposure — creating a sense of discovery within the darker repertoire of the project. And now we're exploring portals in a housing project in the US, mid-income, with strong budget limitations. How do we bring the most amount of dignity to these units? The portals came as a solution for artistic efficiency — creating a space that feels grand, like a classical palazzo, even within real constraints. So it's definitely a key we return to — but it unlocks different possibilities depending on the program and the puzzle we're solving.
DOUGLAS HARSEVOORT — I'd add that it's probably the most universal tool everyone can relate to. The torii in Japan, Karnak in Egypt, colonnades and porticos across all of Europe — and you see them all over New York and even the Midwest, often replicating a kind of neoclassicism. It's a gesture that everyone can layer their own set of experiences onto. You don't need to have studied architecture to gather something from it — you carry it already from your own experience in the world. It has this built-in, layered set of histories that everyone brings to it.
JUAN SALA — It's a play on some of the concepts we mentioned — two mirrors to create a labyrinth. How do you take neon, with its connotations of high-tech environments, purity, economy of ornament — and bring it to the Baroque, where your first judgement is the sum of multiple parts combined to create extravagance. Unity versus multiplicity. Purity versus extravagance.
Neon Baroque came as a concept to describe the medical facility of today — where we needed to create a high-tech medical environment, but also wanted to pay homage to forms that had a precedent. A way to create something with both a sense of urgency and a sense of the past, and in that generate new forms.
WM — Can you speak on your experience working between Mexico City and Paris?
JUAN SALA — Mexico City for us represents a sense of possibility, a youthful spirit, an incredibly creative environment. Young people creating entrepreneurially — in the arts, in architecture, food, film, entrepreneurship. We find it tremendously inspiring. It's a country with this proximity between an immense, fascinating, complex, and infinite history — and a sense of creation and urgency of our time. Between those two things, we found the home for the studio. Incredibly fertile conditions to make the work we do.
That artistic efficiency has become one of our operating principles. And it's been a way for us to come to Paris and find how to create luxurious and unique experiences through few means. The most optimal negotiation between form and outcome. All of these cultures reinforce each other, and each context is unique and enriching.
If you get too stuck in your home place, you can become complacent and stop noticing the beauty and cultural significance of things around you. Whereas as outsiders, Juan's and my WhatsApp are filled with buildings we send each other from around Mexico, because we're constantly curious about this place. We're seeing it from a slightly different angle — seeing the forest from the trees, rather than being blinded by them from within our own home context.