Los Angeles-based architecture firm MUTUO‘s structure begins with the true story of Abraham.

Hard-working and skilled, Abraham, an immigrant from Mexico, has a steady income, pays his bills, and lives without debt. With no payroll history, he does not fit the traditional description of a home loan borrower.

Abraham finds himself stuck outside a system carefully designed to minimize risk and create wealth.

To spark a conversation around this reality, MUTUO invites visitors to explore an abstract concept of a home while considering what it means to create a flexible housing system.

To express the system’s complexity, MUTUO used the medium of collage to create an emotional response to the confusion that occurs during the home ownership process, especially for people who do not fit the mold of a typical home buyer.

Using this collage, MUTUO created an interactive experience to highlight these challenges. Click here to interact with it.

The driving concept for MUTUO is to ignite creative thinking around inclusivity in homeownership.

The two carved wood columns were fashioned in the village of Cuanajo using a technique comprised of Indigenous knowledge of the Purepecha people, and the mudejar techniques brought by Spanish colonizers.

The center pottery column inside the structure is built out of stacked, hand-molded cocuchas (mud-based pottery fired at ground level and air-dried), a precolonial handcraft from the Purepecha village of Cocucho.

The inclusion of these unique columns into this installation represents a rejection of the idea that the housing system must be a rigid set of rules and instead celebrates the customization, empowerment, and diversity that can exist within a flexible housing system.

This piece of pottery and the wood column create cultural connections to the structure.