“Horizontal vertigo” and the architecture of Pato

The entrance to Nogal 59. Image credit: Pato

by Ambika Subra.

Juan Villoro now famously referred to Mexico City as a “horizontal vertigo” - a place that unfolds not upward but outward, a labyrinth of nonlinear, magical chaos. To live here is to get lost and found in equal measure. It’s a city where a last-minute lunch can shift your day, where you might follow a stranger into a new neighborhood and come out with a lifelong friend, or find yourself questioning everything because of a particular alleyway.

It was in this horizontal vertigo that I found myself having dinner with a close friend and renowned architect: Patricio “Pato” Galindo Chain.

To understand Pato's architecture is to understand how he inhabits his city. His work - spanning from the boutique Hotel Dama in Mexico City to the retreat Mi Cielo in Valle de Bravo - rarely announces itself with grandiosity. Instead, it collaborates with history, with time, with those who move through it. His motto: “Architecture is precisely the construction of a space by inhabiting it.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in Nogal 59, his residence in Santa María la Ribera. To describe its architecture is to describe the way Pato tells stories, lives in loops, and designs with a sensitivity to rhythm - visual, social, and temporal.

Santa María la Ribera is one of Mexico City’s oldest neighborhoods, a blend of French mansions and DIY repairs, where chaos isn’t an inconvenience but a pattern. On Pato’s street, Calle Nogal, there are no curated storefronts. Instead, rotating clusters of mechanics spill onto the sidewalks like shifting exhibits. Depending on the car parked out front - a cherry-red sedan, a deep green antique van—the light inside Nogal 59 shifts.

This is a feedback loop. Exterior becomes interior. Interior becomes story.

A terrace at Nogal 59. Image credit: Pato

The house itself is a three-story structure designed for one person, but it never feels solitary. “The symphony of the street,” he says, “is a presence I share my space with. It's my timekeeper.” At 6:30am, the smell of burning wood from the tamale vendor cracks open the day. By 11:30pm, a pulsing techno beat signals the arrival of a vendor no one sees but everyone expects. These sounds don’t just mark time, but shape being.

There is rhythm, but never stasis. The vintage tiles, warm woods, and restored furnishings reflect a reverence for the past, but the home exists in fluid motion. It accepts contradiction - modern and antique, open and enclosed.

Sometimes, movement across space requires crossing boundaries: rooftops, windows, time. Pato once had to crawl through a neighbor’s roof to re-enter his own home after being locked out. Another time, a seismic alarm revealed a neighbor’s hidden menagerie - cats, birds, even possums. These moments aren’t exceptions, but extensions of the home itself. When walls become porous, stories seep through.

The kitchen-diner at Nogal 59. Image credit: Pato.

This porousness defines Nogal 59. Plants lean against gridded steel windows. A hallway stretches alongside glass, letting the light shift throughout the day. In a bedroom, a tree outside seems to crawl into the closet. The house doesn’t contain a story, but loops it. The street becomes the house. The house reflects the street. A home becomes a living document of place.

As Villoro might suggest, it’s not just horizontal - it’s vertiginous. Because in that outward sprawl, there’s also deep descent: into memory, collaboration, layered time. To describe Pato’s work is not to list achievements or styles, but to map a way of moving through the world. His architecture is built not just with materials, but with motion, atmosphere, and entanglement. It is an architecture of chaos. And Nogal 59, at the corner of Calle Nogal and everything else, is where the work starts living.

Editor’s Note: A fuller selection of Pato’s work can be viewed via his firm’s website, here.