14 000 tiles: floor at Palacio de hierro, Mítikah

TPG Architecture partner Alec Zaballero has lead designs for numerous El Palacio de Hierro department stores, and I joined his studio in 2019 in time for the interior design of a new flagship store that had just begun construction in the Xoco neighborhood of Mexico City. The cherished Mexican institution is famed for its amenities ranging from personal shoppers to tattoo parlors, and I worked with Gal Vaknin-Raz (now of Studio RB) to ensure that the enormous daylit indoor food court topping the five-level store captured the vibrancy of an outdoor market. Our complex array of details included a 14,000-tile floor composed of four types that, while appearing random within any given area, were distributed algorithmically to create gradients, from busy to calm, reflective of programmatic needs.