Casa Peñas

Casa Peñas, located in the Pedregal district to the south of Mexico City, has been developed behind a large volcanic stone wall that encloses a private garden. The project’s volumes are set back from these walls, generating voids, endpoints, and light wells. The various spaces are turned towards this garden generating a dynamic relationship between the interior and exterior, taking advantage of the inward-facing views of the project.

The main street entrance consists of two white-concrete volumes and a natural steel plane. The short side, which creates the façade on the street, is almost completely blind, whereas inside the long side of the first floor volume is entirely glazed, connecting every room with these open spaces.

The program is arranged longitudinally in a careful modulation over two levels, with only the central staircase breaking the scheme to generate a large, double-height space

 

Pedregal, Mexico City, 2015

610 sqm

Photographs: Onnis Luque

Insurgentes 670

This low-budget intervention initially required a study of the void resulting from the positioning of the minimal rooms and built elements. A series of independent volumes were the only components designed within this enclosure; the spaces that needed to be fully closed were defined, and the arrangement of each of these volumes generated new, more open, and flexible workspaces. The position and correspondence of these minimal built elements produced a new space suited to the layout of the program and the correct operation of a new floor of offices.

 

Colonia del Valle, Mexico City, 2014

449 sqm

Photographs: Ignacio Urquiza

Infonavit Vivienda Unifamiliar Regional, Puebla

In 2014, we were invited by Infonavit to participate in the “Regional Single Family Housing” program. Thirty-two architecture firms participated in this program: each one was given the brief to develop a social housing strategy congruent with the local characteristics of each state, and each studio was assigned a particular city. For the city of Puebla, an interdisciplinary urban study defined an appropriate housing model.

The core strategy was to increase the density of social housing within a given urban radius. We found a variety of sites that were potential candidates for housing construction; however, the irregularity and narrowness of many of them made them unsuitable for traditional social housing projects.

We therefore proposed a high-density program of single-family dwellings, using very small floor areas and resolving the program over three or four levels with a family of modular prototypes that could occupy these spaces in a density of up to 100 units per hectare.

For the design of the five prototypes, we began with an initial module with a 4.5 x 3 meter floor area. In this module 4.5 m2 are allocated for a core of services and 9 m2 for the “served” area. This is the minimum module that defines prototypes A and A’. Adding a further half-module creates the prototype B typology, and joining two modules forms the prototypes C and C’. This strategy produced a set of three vertical typologies with three variations.

 

Puebla, Puebla, 2014

10,000 sqm