Since I started working in 3D, I've been drawn to creating unreal spaces that evoke a sense of digital serenity. My first inspiration for this project was the book Dreamscapes and Artificial Architecture, published by Gestalten. However, I soon felt the need to reinterpret that kind of imaginary through a more Mexican perspective for my thesis.

My first reference was the Surrealist movement in Mexico—a cultural phenomenon that flourished in the country, to the point where André Breton and Salvador Dalí described Mexico as the ultimate surrealist place. However, many scholars agree that this label came more from a lack of understanding of Mexican culture than from a true conceptual alignment. Mexico is surrealist, yes—but I believe they said so from a misguided place.

My second reference was brutalist architecture. Although it didn’t originate in Mexico, many Mexican architects embraced and reinterpreted it, and its presence can still be seen throughout Mexico City. For this project, I focused on how Mexican architecture incorporates traditional elements such as color, materials, and structural forms. In particular, I resonated deeply with Emotional Architecture, developed by Mathias Goeritz and Luis Barragán. This approach aims to evoke emotion through light, color, water, and nature—elements I always strive to integrate into my spatial compositions, and whose philosophy aligned closely with my vision for this piece.

Lastly, I drew inspiration from Mexican black-and-white photography and cinema. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to explore this project in black and white. On one hand, as a response to the oversaturation of vibrant color in digital art today; and on the other, as a personal challenge to focus more closely on detail, lighting, and texture—without the “distraction” of color. I found deep inspiration in the work of photographers Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide, and Juan Rulfo (a key figure in magical realism). I also felt strong visual affinity with certain frames from the film María Candelaria (1943).

BRUTALISMO MÁGICO is an appropriation of Mexican surrealism and brutalist architecture, adapted into digital art through contemporary tools. The main software I used was Houdini, and my final deliverable was a piece of procedural architecture built entirely within it. At the start, I had no idea how to make procedural architecture in Houdini, and I wasn’t very comfortable coding either—so it was a significant personal challenge. After much experimentation, trial and error, and restarting many times, I developed an HDA (Houdini Digital Asset) where you can use sliders to define the structure’s volume, number of components, and the seed—resulting in infinite combinations of brutalist forms. The nopales were created using a solver, and the flowers were developed through experimentation with an L-system, all within Houdini.