Clara Chapus

Clara Chapus is a French architect, urbanist and artist, working between Paris and Mexico City.

Trained at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles, she develops a practice at the intersection of architecture and sculpture, shaped by an observation of places, light, and silence.

Over the past four years, she has worked on several architectural projects in Mexico with Naso and Frida Escobedo, including the scenography for the Cartier exhibition at Museo Jumex and the renovation of Lago Algo gallery. She subsequently co-founded Colectivo Talacha (meaning “to tinker” or “to work with what already exists”), an architectural collective developing transformation projects, including a competition to rethink the Evangelion tunnels in Milan. Specializing in the rehabilitation and transformation of existing buildings, she now leads her own architectural projects, primarily focused on working with the existing.

Alongside her architectural practice, she founded studio a.c.e. in 2020, dedicated to the production of plaster and concrete sculptures inspired by architecture and her Mexican roots.

Her sculptures are fragments of imaginary architectures: arches, staircases, patios, walls, towers. Elementary forms, often without a defined scale or function, that evoke places without an obvious program, like sets suspended outside of time.

Between memory and invention, her work draws on references as diverse as Luis Barragán, De Chirico, and Aldo Rossi: walls and color, metaphysical perspectives, the repetition of primitive forms, and unfinished architectures. A melancholic and uncanny universe, where raw matter becomes the medium for dreams, inner journeys, and stories that each viewer is free to imagine.