This apartment building is located in a patrimonial protected area, conformed by modern era style houses from the 50s in Guadalajara. This insertion allows permeability towards the gardens situated in front of the building. This gesture is reproduced by the building’s low interior walls, and permeable fences on its perimeter that hold a gardened base. The encounter of the reticulated strokes, non-parallel to the city’s urban planning, in a time where the goal was to break with this rigor established in the renaissance era, generated these triangular and trapezoidal sites all around the area.
Given this, the building site has two important faces, one towards a smaller and quieter street, and the other towards the main avenue that connects the industrial area to the west side of the city. The main entrance of the building is placed under the façade mentioned first, while the other side is designated for commercial businesses justified by the commotion of the avenue. The complex is placed within the site as an excavated monolith, being an extrusion of the plot’s trapezoidal geometry.
As a stereotomic exercise, it allows the building to have natural ventilation and lighting across all four façades. The solid volume recognizes the immediate neighbors through a subtle and heterogeneous language, permitting the total integration of the building. The hard language of the materials is exploited to generate a double façade. The resulting voids turn into terraces, becoming the protective barrier between the interior space and the exterior bustle and harsh sunlight.
The solution to the monolith is given by distributing the dwelling in four different towers, attended by two independent circulation cores, rejecting conventional hallways. Even though the building takes the entire square footage of the plot, to lighten this large mass, the volume is excavated, looking to provoke a less harsh aspect within the context. The towers are interrupted to permit ventilation and natural lighting for all the units, to create more common areas, and liveable rooftops. Text description by the architects.
