Gómez Platero Architecture & Urbanism don’t mince words about their ambitions. The firm’s founder, Martín Gómez Platero, announces openly that the company’s purpose, shared with his 170 employees and associates, is to “make Earth the best place to live”. They had to start with Montevideo (the capital of Uruguay, where the firm is based), but the last twenty years have been spent spreading the word of their style and technical methods across Latin America, with notable projects now peppering the plateaus from Guayaquil to Ciudad de Guatemala, Monterrey to Mexico City. As of today, they’ve built more than one and a half million square meters in over 36 cities and 13 countries, designing buildings that are used by more than 30 million people a year.

One gets the sense from reading their presentations that the GP team is an unfashionably sincere bunch. Their portfolios – of both their permanent staff and their completed projects – evince admirable confidence in the firm’s potential to reinvent the nature of whatever commissions come their way. Indeed, they appear more like artists who haven’t had to sell out to succeed or compromise to convey their ideals. One of the latter is what they call ‘hypermixture’: where “the different uses [of a building project] are strategically combined to produce disruptive experiences.” What this means in practice is that the twin poles of their firm’s concerns (Architecture & Urbanism) exist to reinforce each other. Their buildings are continuations of public spaces, just as all the buildings in an area are put together to form the continuity of urban life.

This clearly also reflects their internal corporate philosophy, declaring that “none of us is as good as all of us put together and that is what defines us.” Likewise, Martín insists, “It’s not professional or economic success that makes people happy. It’s the quality of their interpersonal relationships.” Thus, an architecture that is not based on that sense of authentic value is doomed to be inhumane and purposeless.

All of these precepts and principles can perhaps be summed up in a sampling of some of their flagship projects: the firm takes special pride in the concept for the Cala del Yacht mixed-use development in Canelones, which they say “contributes a new urban image, where architecture and landscape complement each other in harmony”, as well as the Catehua project in Monterrey, still under construction, which promises to emerge as an “oasis” of natural, ambient commerce amidst a glassy, brilliant and spacious modern plaza.

Best of all, perhaps, is Montemagna: a magnificent planned community situated in a 1009-hectare plot nestled between the Ecuadorian cities of Manta, Jaramijó, and Montecristi. Though a ‘hybrid’ development in its equal reverence for the natural geography and its new tenants, the site’s “areas of greater value in terms of landscape are acknowledged and intensified [in its construction], with the presence of vegetation infiltrating the urban experience.” As such, this one project exemplifies GP’s efforts to reconcile progress and conservation, artifice and natural beauty.

As with any great firm, diversity and adaptability are the virtues Gómez Platero aspires to live up to with every new project and each new self-directed step into the future.

All in all, I’d say their genuine creative ambition is the most lovably old-fashioned thing about them. Watch this space.

Visit the company’s website at https://www.gomezplatero.com/es/ to learn more about their services, team, and various projects, or follow them on Instagram @gomezplateroarq