Architectural Order within Urban Disorder The Hippodrome Tower in Guadalajara, Mexico (2012-18), by OAB (Office of Architecture in Barcelona), is one of the crowning achievements in Carlos Ferrater’s fifty-plus years of creating architecture;on this occasion together with Xavier Martí,and with the collaboration of Álvaro Berubén. It is an irregular prism that manages to bring order to a growth area of the Jalisco capital, in which there is not onlyan unforeseenmélange of typologies—from single-family houses to tower blocks—but also no extantplan for a hierarchized road system adapted to the marked increase in traffic. The tower stands where the dramatic, unplanned survival of streets and roadways prior to urban growth abound.

This is a golden opportunity, then, for OAB to once again demonstrate its confidence in the capacity of typology, composition and technology to establish urban order. The context of both city and landscape has been the raison d’être of Ferrater’s work from the very first. And when this setting is incapable of providing inspiration,there emerges the order of the architecture itself to establish a reference, a landmark that indicates and enjoys the good orientations and views. In actual fact this is a building primarily conceived in terms of vision: the distant view, with its honest and clear monumentality; the near-to, in the entrance routing which privileges a tactile sense; the vista from the within the building, perfectly framed in the modulating of the openings; and the nocturnal view, with the tower converted into a lantern that emits the light from its geometrically perforated skin, thus creating a pixeled image.