Waterprize Grohe
TANAT | 2025
TANAT + architects / artists | 2025
TANAT + LIGA | 2024
Collective | 2024
TANAT + architects | 2024
In many Mexican cities, drinking water has not simply disappeared from public life; it has been reorganized through a dense economy of substitution. It arrives by truck, in plastic bottles, in twenty-liter garrafones, through rooftop tanks, domestic filters, purification shops, informal deliveries, and routines of storage that turn access to water into an everyday practice of calculation.
What appears as a failure of the network has also produced a spatial and economic culture in which responsibility is transferred to households, and often to the bodies that carry, buy, clean, mistrust, and manage water before it can be consumed.
Rizoma de Lluvia begins from this condition of displacement. Developed in Chimalhuacán, on the eastern metropolitan edge of Mexico City, the project is a rainwater-harvesting fountain that collects, stores, filters, and returns water to public use. Its architectural question is not limited to capture or efficiency, although both are necessary to its operation.
The project asks what kind of public relation to water might still be possible in a territory where scarcity has been normalized through private coping mechanisms, and where potable water is often encountered less as a civic right than as a purchased, carried, and carefully guarded commodity.
Installed at Deportivo Las Flores, a community-managed sports ground, the fountain enters an existing social infrastructure of soccer leagues, neighborhood support, daily maintenance, and local trust.
Rain falls onto an inhabitable surface, moves through gravel and sand, enters an underground tank, passes through filtration, is pumped upward, and returns through a public tap. Rather than aestheticizing the mechanism or turning scarcity into an image of resilience, the project gives spatial form to a process that is usually hidden.
Part of Rizoma del Agua, a research platform within TÁNAT, the project approaches the rhizome as a way of working through attachment, adaptation, and partial connection. Its value does not lie in replacing a public water system, nor in presenting rainwater harvesting as an isolated solution, but in making visible the sequence through which water becomes drinkable.
In Chimalhuacán, the project gathers only a fraction of rain, but it uses that fraction to ask how water might become again a matter of shared space, maintenance, and collective life.