BGP Arquitectura - Black House

Monday, 01 December 2008 00:35

Located on the hill above a small village at some 150km from Mexico City, the main feature of this retreat is its magnificent view. Its aim is to live with the landscape under a canopy with as few interior elements as possible.

A fireplace, a kitchen bar and a marble platform 20m long laid as a free floor plan for public areas and garage on top of a solid block which houses the rest of the program, namely services, three bedrooms and a family room.

Plans

Elevations

Transversal Section

This covered roof garden becomes the most important part of the house. The most crowded area in which the family will spend most of the time. It is also the most ambiguous place of the house, one-half-house is then one-half-terrace, protected from the exterior conditions when needed by means of four meter tall sliding glass panels towards the landscape and a wall as high as the garage doors towards the street always detached from the concrete canopy to turn it into a fence more than a wall.
The exposed concrete canopy emphasizes views and deals with an anachronistic local code on context which calls for typical-construction looking elements and materials such as pitched roofs with Spanish tile simply by flipping it. In this way, views and orientation of the house towards south makes sense, blocking sun on summer not on winter.

The solid block is all exposed concrete on the inside and marble on the outside just like the roof in order to reinforce the idea of a solid 3 meter high platform with slots carefully located to glance through the surroundings from the bed, desk or the shower.

The rest of the site remains with its natural slope and local therefore highly adaptive vegetation that frame the view and wraps a family vegetable garden.

Interior materials go out of the house and exterior materials come into the house. One-half-house promotes blurring limits between indoor and outdoor; the Mediterranean house revisited versus the glass hermetic air-conditioned house, live the view rather than see it.

Project data:

Project: Black House (casa Negra)
Location: Valle de Bravo, Mexico

Architecture: bgp arquitectura, Bernardo Gomez-Pimienta with Hugo Sanchez
Project team: JN Morones Esquivel, Ximena Díaz

Lot area: 500m2.
Surface area constructed: 300m2

Structural engineer: Jaime Fragoso
Mechanical engineer: Arturo Guerra
Glazing: Val y Val
3D model: Hugo Sanchez

Photography: Rafael Gamo