Novasem Campus

The large campus for a corn seed company first led the Mexican design team to think of a set of buildings placed on a landscape, but they soon treated the project as a landscape in which buildings, open spaces and countryside are considered together. The layout follows the processes of harvesting, transport, sorting, packing and storage.

The team drew on Romantic landscape painting, where figures face a vast, blurred nature, and on the late colour field paintings of Rothko, read as spaces between fields of colour. The project makes a round trip from landscape to abstract painting and back, placing abstract built volumes on the land.

Weathered steel and concrete volumes stand in the fields, with narrow gaps between them and simple industrial interiors.