ON A COLONIAL back road in notable Coyoacán, in focal Mexico City, a three-story block tower transcends the low-roofed adobe homes in an overly complex neighborhood. The fall evening's blurring light tinges the building's veneer — dividers of permeable blocks laid at right points to let in air and light while protecting the inside from see — a consumed sienna. This is Studio Iturbide, the most recent undertaking by the Mexico City-based firm Taller/Mauricio Rocha + Gabriela Carrillo, who assembled it for Rocha's mom, the picture taker Graciela Iturbide, whose likeness, most broadly of weathered ladies in Oaxacan towns, is in the lasting accumulations of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Center Pompidou in Paris and the Brooklyn Museum.

The 75-year-old Iturbide is holding up at the entryway, little, her dark hair short and wavy, her appearance smooth. "Mauricio will be here soon," she says, as we enter her solid workspace, which is built of minimal more than red block and wood-surrounded sheets of glass. The engineers made a hundred models previously concurring on the present outline: three nine-foot-high, 300-square-foot rooms stacked on each other, alongside two inside bricked-in porches on the primary floor outfitted with dirt pots of desert flora and other provincial plants, which offer the main visual disturbance of the house's earthen tints and demanding lines. Inside, the block dividers are decorated with close to nothing yet the shadows of the day's moving light.

Taking the expansive wooden stairs, which are joined by undetectable steel underpins and seem suspended in midair, Iturbide strolls us from the formal first-floor lounge room, with its Isamu Noguchi paper lamp and low, innovator couch, past the easygoing second-floor family room and up to the best floor of the building. "This is my studio, where I work," she says, her arms outstretched to take in the breezy 16-by-19-foot space, lit by the sun coming in through two divider estimate windows. Here, on a nine-foot-long oak table, Iturbide alters her photos. Forty years of documents are put away in many level, secret elements on custom hardwood bookshelves that ascent from either side of the table. "The inside space is essential for me and my work," she says. "I should be separated from everyone else regularly."

This isn't the first run through Iturbide's child has made her a working: Across the road is her primary house, a cream-hued adobe structure that Rocha worked in 1991, when he was 25 and had quite recently completed engineering school. In 2014, looking for more space (and flexibility from her things), Iturbide bought an unfilled part and requesting that he expand on it. Her exclusive condition was that it be made of block: "What I needed was to be peaceful in my studio," she says. "I gave him add up to opportunity." The outcome, which took two years to finish, joins four sorts of block — high quality in various measurements in Puebla, a city known for its earthenware production — with tzalam, an intensely grained hardwood brought from Mexico's tropical south. Iturbide calls the building her "little production line of blocks."

ITURBIDE WAS BORN in Mexico City, the oldest of 13 kids in a rich, moderate Roman Catholic family. She had needed to be an essayist, however her dad prohibited it, and at 19, she wedded a planner, Manuel Rocha Díaz, and had three kids in eight years: Manuel, an arranger; Mauricio, the engineer; and Claudia, who passed on abruptly when she was 6.

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After Claudia's demise, Iturbide separated from her better half and enlisted in film school at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. There she met a teacher, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who had turned out to be one of Latin America's driving photographic artists, and whose photos chronicled different craftsmen at work. "He opened my life," she says, "and with him I became acquainted with Mexico." When she abandoned film to in any case photography in her 30s, she wound up enchanted of indigenous societies, living for quite a long time at any given moment in the town of Juchitán on the southern bank of Mexico among the ladies of the Zapotec clan. Iturbide was attracted to "the character of the ladies, their autonomy, how they deal with the economy," and started recording their day by day schedules. It was in Juchitán that she built up her mark style, making close-up pictures in high-differentiate high contrast that caught the occupants' everyday exercises: going by the market, drinking a brew. Her 1979 photo of a Zapotec lady conveying seven live iguanas on her head, "Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas," has turned out to be one of Mexico's famous pictures.

As Iturbide discusses the Zapotec ladies, her child quietly takes a seat alongside her. He is 52, short-haired and strong, listening mindfully to his mom; every so often, he touches her shoulder tenderly. "My association with my mom has dependably been essential," he says later. "We discuss what every one of us is doing, and we share thoughts regarding the way we see the world."

In college, Rocha had a predisposition against engineering, he says, "on the grounds that it's for the most part an undertaking to produce cash, and it manages arithmetic." Ultimately, however, he ended up inspired by the spatial idea of the teach, the way that, dissimilar to other imaginative undertakings, it is concerned totally with "light and space," an expression he rehashes regularly. It's a theory straightforwardly roused by his mom's work: "I am keen on influencing the working to work like a diafragma" — the camera's gap — "to control the light," he says.

In reality, similar to this house, Rocha's real bonuses, for example, the School of Visual Arts of Oaxaca (2001) and the Pátzcuaro courthouse in Michoacán (2015), put long outside passages between glass-walled atria and forcing dividers of volcanic stone, tile or block, frequently punctuated with openings to deliberately dark or uncover the sun. A large portion of his structures are inadequately outfitted, and all for all intents and purposes dispose of obvious fake brightening. Next, he'll complete his development of Diego Rivera's Anahuacalli Museum in Coyoacán, a multistory structure of dark volcanic shake that offers a glaring difference to Rivera's energetic wall paintings.

From that point forward, there's another home to make for his mom: this one a nation home in Malinalco, a pre-Columbian town in a valley supported by emotional earth precipices two hours south of Mexico City. In late decades, Iturbide has moved her concentration from individuals to scenes; her new environment, she trusts, will give her the motivation that city life never again can. The two are as yet arranging what her future space may resemble, yet they both concur there will be less dividers and more windows, the structure's vistas over the stone feigns as sweeping as could reasonably be expected. "It will be totally, dislike this," Iturbide says, her child gesturing in understanding. "There, I need to see everything.