Naturaleza Y Arquitectura Se Funden En Esta Casa _ Ep 02 OPEN PLAN _ House Tou

The house is located in the west of the city of Aguascalientes. It is still in the urban area, but with a characteristic that feels like an Eden. This is a land of a few hectares. Hi, I'm Engels, he's Javier, and we are Colectivo Arrabal. The land has the peculiarity that it is the mesquite trees, which are from the area. It also has a small drought, which is like a channel, where the water passes in rainy season. At some point in the history of this land, it overflowed a little and knocked down some of the mesquites, but it didn't kill them. This made them grow, obviously looking for the sun, and they grew crooked, which makes them very curious. They had that presence, and they already marked what the house had to be. They were the inhabitants of the place, they were already here, and what we had to do with the house was to invite them to be, to be part of the spaces, and not so much to build the house in spite of, but to build the house for the trees, which had been here much longer than we had lived. At the time of that tree being inclined and rising again, it gave us the opportunity to work in their same arches. We were able to dig without touching the root, it was already looking for a way to give it that respect, that space, so that its branches would pass, so that if the tree grew, they wouldn't get in the way, and if it made air, it wouldn't have any kind of damage. The ladies asked us to make a house that reminded them of their childhood, and they lived in the center of the city. So the typical reference is the saguan and the central patio of the traditional house. The house is located a bit in the middle of the land, it's not located in the middle of the street, which helps us as a first experience to live the nature of the place. Well, the saguan had to be part of this project, because it's a very important space of the traditional Mexican architecture. The social area is composed of three spaces, which are the living room, the dining room, and the heart, which is the kitchen. The owners of this house are people who socialize a lot, so we needed versatile spaces. What we did was make two openings, one has a view of the central patio, and the other one has a view of the terrace. It should be mentioned that they have accordion cancelleries that open in their entirety. This helps the spaces to merge, to make a very large common space. The kitchen is the main element where everything that will happen in the house is baked. The kitchen goes to the garden, to the terrace, to the dining room, to the patio, to the bedrooms. It's a space where the whole family naturally converges. We also look for the warm, yellow tones of the fireplace to let the light in, and everything should feel with this amber atmosphere, like a relation to the fire, to the firewood with which it was previously cooked. They are like visual references, perhaps of color, that have to be transmitted as something very warm. Part of the conceptualization of the project was that it was a very authentic project, that it didn't hide things. So we opted for apparent materials such as tabique, the stone is apparent, the floors are concrete with some details in wood. Many of these materials are not even from Huascalientes. Many materials such as forges come from Guadalajara, skulls come from Taxco Guerrero, stones come from the highlands of Jalisco. All this was something complicated, since we had to integrate the times with the development of the construction, as the materials were coming to us in many cases. We integrated some elements to which we call towers, curved shapes, which are the ones that contain the trees. Adding these shapes with a curved stroke, which gave it that organic feel, beyond the natural context, the house was also going to acquire curved shapes that embraced, creating courtyards, gardens. Walking through the gallery that surrounds the central courtyard, we find the rooms that can be opened, both the door and these curtains as accordion panels that open, so that all the rooms can converge, both in sound and in visual aspect, towards the central courtyard, which is what coordinates the whole house. The rooms, although they open towards the central courtyard, also each one opens towards its private courtyard, which are these curved walls that embrace some tree, some vegetation, and give that open but private view to the bedroom. Each project is unique, each project has its essence, and the most important thing is to see that satisfaction to the client. It was a great conclusion that this house left us, to be able to adapt and have that flexibility, that is, the terrain or the place or the context has many things to teach us that are not seen when you are on your designer pedestal, with a sheet or on the computer behind a desk. The architecture is not perfect, so you always have to have that open mind to let us learn about the construction process. There you will find some anecdotes, which are situations that complicate it, but that help you to solve it in another way and find a better result.