IN 2018, THE ceramist Andrea Mantecón moved from Spain, where she’d recently completed a master’s degree in architecture, to Switzerland for a job in Basel at the firm Herzog & de Meuron. Since her childhood in the central Mexican city of Zacatecas, Mantecón, now 34, had always assumed “there were more opportunities abroad than at home,” she says. Once in Europe, however, she missed the spontaneity of Mexico and the intensity of New York, where she’d worked for the architect David Adjaye after college. It was in that city that Mantecón learned pottery, which led to a new idea: merging architecture and ceramics. During the pandemic, Mantecón and her Polish partner, Lukasz Szlachcic, 41, also an architect at Herzog, started auditioning new cities in which to live — Dublin, Copenhagen, London and Berlin — but none felt right. Then, Szlachcic asked, “What about Mexico?”
Mantecón moved first to Oaxaca, a city rich in craft but crowded, she felt, with businesses that treated artisans poorly. Wary of becoming another interloper, she next went to her birth city of Guadalajara, home to one of Mexico’s most diverse pottery traditions. In 2021, she enrolled in a workshop with the ceramist Maxine Álvarez, 55, who’s spent a decade mining her own clay in the hills west of Guadalajara and creating glazes with the ashes of regional plants (black with golden undertones from guava leaves; crackled green from agave fiber). Mantecón soon relocated full time to Guadalajara and began a company called Lofa in a small work space in the Colonia Americana neighborhood. There she and her sole employee made hand-molded tiles glazed in natural oxides that ranged from lustrous ocher and turquoise to obsidian black and unvarnished, mica-flecked earth.
When he arrived the following year, Szlachcic moved into Mantecón’s modest apartment, a pair of rooms on one side of the atelier building’s courtyard; after finishing his Herzog work for the day, he helped glaze tiles and unload the kiln. “Maxine showed us where to buy materials and who could make molds for us,” Mantecón says, while members of Occidente, a loose network of independent designers, and José Noé Suro — the director of the studio Cerámica Suro and a respected leader within Guadalajara’s design scene — introduced Lofa to new clients. Within a year, the team had expanded to 10 (it’s now 27), and the couple’s living and working quarters started to feel cramped.
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