Local art collective Xpan has created a store in Guadalajara lined with modular aluminium shelving that can be rearranged and shifted depending on the needs of the space.
Located in Guadalajara’s Colonia Americana neighbourhood, Espacio.gdl is a commercial space designed and built by Xpan, a local studio that creates a broad array of work such as sound installations and publications.
According to the studio, Espacio.gdl was “conceived as an adaptable infrastructure”, where its extensive spread of aluminium shelves can be reorganised to display a variety of different items.
The store is broken into a ground level and a mezzanine, which are connected by a dark steel staircase that hugs one side of the space.
Shelving units made of cage-like steel frames are pushed into the walls on each level, interspersed with vertical bars of lighting.
Noduales along the length of the frames support thin, aluminium shelves, which can be removed or aligned to create one long beam.
Xpan explained that the system is part of its ongoing work to develop modular, adaptable systems, following the creation of a similar shelving system for a Mexico City space also designed by the studio.
“We’re interested in structures that behave less as containers and more as instruments,” Xpan founder Moisés Sacal Hadid told Dezeen. “The project derives from Xpan’s ongoing research into metabolic systems – architectures that evolve through matter, sound, and interaction.”
“The inspiration comes from precision and reconfigurability: how a minimal vocabulary of steel, aluminum, and light can articulate complexity without excess.”
The vertical lighting was created as part of this system, and was clad in polycarbonate panels that act as “diffusers” to refract and “expand” light around the space.
At the centre of the store, white, translucent curtains and black box speakers hang downwards from a steel mobile structure, which creates “internal subdivisions” according to the studio.
Suspended vases also hang from the structure.
The same white curtains hang on one side of the shelving units, and also line the mezzanine.
The remaining surfaces are bare, unclad concrete.
Dezeen recently rounded up nine independent studios shaping design in Guadalajara, while Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos recently completed a sports academy in the city.
The photography is by g.mar_med.
Project credits:
Xpan team: Luis Arenas, Emiliano Danis, Gimena Bustamante, Miguel Reyes, and Humberto Cuapio
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