Description

The three architects Isaac Broid, Michael Rojkind and Miguel Adria briefly worked together between 1998 and 2002 and designed this award-winning house during that time. The house is located in the Condado de Sayavedra, a hilly area with exuberant vegetation on the north-eastern suburbs of Mexico City.

The F2 house is conceived as a focus of social activity rather than simply as a residence. Consequently, it was necessary to strike a balance between spaces for public exposure and the intimacy of home. It was also necessary to resolve a significant drop at the back of the site, a topographic condition which presented challenges but, also, provided the opportunity to separate drastically the three zones of the house:

1. recreation on the lower level which serves as bar and playroom but could double as accommodation for guests;
2. social activity and services on the ground level, which contains the access, kitchen and the living and dining rooms;
3. private quarters in the upper level (bedrooms and bathrooms).

Each level is orientated differently according to its use. The lower level opens to the garden. The ground level faces south in order to maximise distant views while benefiting from passive solar gain in the winter time. In the upper level, the bedrooms face east so that they look onto the street and receive morning light rather than strong afternoon light.

The structure is a combination of load-bearing walls made of concrete on the outer sides of the L-shape, i.e. the north and west facades of the house. In the inside of the ‘L’ (east and south facades), a series of metal columns replace the load-bearing walls so that the house opens to the views. This structural configuration conveys a sense of levity, as if the house was floating over the rear garden. This is emphasised by the use of planar concrete elements, both vertically and horizontally, which appear to dematerialise the volumes. Interestingly, this contradicts the natural tectonic of concrete, a material which usually rests heavily on the ground – though it here serves the purpose of making the building look light. In this sense, Broid, Rojkind and Adria depart from the tradition of heavy volumes that was taken to represent Mexican architecture in the work of Barragan, Legorreta and Gonzales de Leon. They also relied heavily on factory-made and standardised building components, as well as on industrial construction techniques, rather than hand-made elements and artisan labour.

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Originally published in: Felipe Hernández, Beyond Modernist Masters. Contemporary Architecture in Latin America, Birkhäuser, 2009.