This dissertation examines the Fashion and Textile Museum (FTM) in Bermondsey, designed by Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta for the British designer Dame Zandra Rhodes, as a case study of architectural transculturation. It explores how Mexican architectural identity is expressed abroad and how cultural exchange between Mexico and London becomes material through architecture. The argument proposed is that the museum embodies a reciprocal process of transformation, where Mexican modernism and British urban culture meet and reshape one another.

The research began with a personal encounter in 2018, when I first came across the building’s bright orange and pink façade set among Bermondsey’s brick warehouses. Its colours and geometry felt instantly familiar, echoing the architecture I had grown up with in Mexico. Yet, within London’s context, it also appeared foreign. This dual feeling — of recognition and estrangement — became the starting point for the question that guided this research: what does it mean for a building to be ‘Mexican’ when it stands in the middle of London?

The study situates the museum within the broader history of Mexican modernism, tracing its development from post-revolutionary nationalism to its international projection through figures such as José Villagrán García, Luis Barragán, and Ricardo Legorreta. Drawing on Celia Esther Arredondo’s The Making of Modern Mexican Architecture (2023), it challenges frameworks of acculturation that view non-Western architecture as derivative, instead adopting Fernando Ortiz’s notion of transculturation— a dynamic and reciprocal process of exchange. This perspective reframes Mexican modernism as an active participant in global architectural discourse rather than a regional response to Western influence.

To expand on this framework, the dissertation draws on Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the contact zone, where cultures meet and negotiate, and Homi Bhabha’s theories of hybridity and translation, which describe how cultural forms change through encounter. Together, these ideas allow the museum to be read as both an object and a process of cultural negotiation, where Mexican and British identities redefine one another.

The methodology combines historical and visual research with site observation and interviews with Zandra Rhodes and Víctor Legorreta. These sources ground the theoretical discussion in practice, revealing how transculturation occurs not only through ideas but through everyday exchanges between architect, client, and local collaborators. My position as a Mexican architect living and working in the UK also shaped the research approach, allowing me to reflect on the museum through a dual lens — of both origin and reception.

The first part of the dissertation, From Mexico to London, traces how Mexican modernism developed as a hybrid formation after the Revolution of 1910. Architects such as Villagrán García and Barragán combined European modernism with local traditions, light, and materiality to form a modern language grounded in emotion and place. Legorreta continued this lineage through what he termed ‘emotional architecture’ — an approach defined by geometry, light, and vivid colour. His work carried forward the spirit of Mexican modernism while extending it internationally.

The dissertation then turns to Bermondsey, situating the museum within its post-industrial regeneration. Once defined by warehouses and food processing, Bermondsey underwent a decline before its transformation in the 1990s into a creative district. Within this context, the FTM played a significant role in reshaping Bermondsey Street as a cultural hub, embodying the shift from industry to design-led redevelopment.

The second part, In London, from Mexico, focuses on the building itself. Located at 79–83 Bermondsey Street, the museum integrates Rhodes’s home and studio with exhibition and educational spaces. Its geometry, light, and use of pink, yellow, and orange express a shared language between Rhodes and Legorreta. For Legorreta, colour reflected Mexican light and tradition; for Rhodes, it was an extension of her textile practice. Their collaboration created an architecture that merges two creative identities and resists being attributed to a single source.

Working alongside local architect Alan Camp, Legorreta adapted his design to London’s planning requirements, demonstrating transculturation in practice. The resulting building is neither a direct export of Mexican modernism nor an imitation of London’s style, but something in between — a hybrid that carries traces of both. As Víctor Legorreta described, it is ‘Mexican, but also Zandra Rhodes, and also London’.

The museum thus operates on multiple levels of exchange: between Mexico and Britain, between architecture and fashion, and between regeneration and identity. Rather than a static object, it functions as a contact zone where cultural meanings are negotiated through form, colour, and collaboration.

The dissertation concludes that the FTM embodies architecture as a living form of cultural translation. Mexican modernism, itself a product of hybrid influences, extends outward and finds new meaning in London’s context. The building challenges linear models of cultural influence, revealing instead a two-way process of transformation. The FTM, at once Mexican and London, demonstrates that architecture is not a fixed expression of identity but a continual act of translation, shaped by movement, memory, and exchange.