HKS Architects: the firm behind One Laguna

Some firms design buildings. Others design experiences. HKS Architects — founded in Dallas in 1939 and now operating across more than twenty-five offices worldwide — unmistakably belongs to the second group.

A portfolio that crosses scales

HKS signs everything from Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium — home of Super Bowl LVI — to hospitals that have redefined contemporary healthcare. Their hospitality work includes projects for Mandarin Oriental, Aman, and Four Seasons. In every case, the firm practices a methodology it calls research-driven design: design born from evidence, not whim.

This scientific discipline of architecture is, paradoxically, what allows HKS to design places with such deep humanity. When one understands how people move, how ecosystems breathe, how light shifts across the year — then, and only then, can architecture stop being obstruction.

The Cancun challenge

One Laguna presented HKS with a different challenge. This was not a single building on an available lot. This was a residential project within a living ecosystem: Nichupté Lagoon, with its mangrove zones declared protected natural area.

The site demanded humility. The lagoon is not a scenic background — it is the protagonist. Our work was to accompany it.

HKS’s response combined two towers — Marina Tower and Isla Tower — with volumes that privilege horizontality, materials in conversation with the water’s palette, and a private marina that enters the lagoon front without aggression.

What sets good residential architecture apart

At One Laguna, the firm applied the same principles that sustain its best hospitality projects: privacy as a right, natural light as protagonist, noble materiality as a promise of durability, and — above all — the conviction that a well-designed place is recognised by what it omits, not by what it displays.

An international collaboration

The project brings HKS together with Territoria (developer), AB Collection, ROAM Studio (interiors), AKF México (structural engineering), Ingenor (MEP), and The Concept Studio (brand identity). It is, at small scale, a congress of trades around a single premise: that contemporary luxury is measured in silence, in light, and in the invisible quality of every decision.