Casa Merida is a single-family house project located in the historic center of Mérida, a few blocks away from its main central square, in its colonial area. Mérida is the capital of Yucatán, but also the capital of the Mayan culture, Yucatán representing a large part of the Mexican Mayan territory.Merida is a city where life without AC is almost impossible, and where it became very usual to use it 24 hours a day. How can we step back from this intense use of AC Mérida is doing today? And what could be the possibilities architecture is offering us? With this goal in mind and having a look at the past, came the following question: How is it possible to build architecture that reflects and considers the yucatán identity, to make this house belong to its territory? In other words, how could this house be Mayan?
Casa Merida project is exploring the relationship between contemporary and traditional architecture; both connected through a very simple use of vernacular references. When entering for the first time on site, something memorable was the unique proportion of the plot, which is a broken rectangle of 80 meters long X 8 meters wide, looking like a big lane. Here came the one and only idea of the project: to preserve this 80 meters perspective, as a straight line, crossing the entire plot from the entrance door until the ending point, where the swimming pool is located; Inserting back the traditional airflow cooling concept as a starting point. But it was not only about the air circulation, but this long perspective is also referring to the Mayan antic culture and architecture, and more precisely to its Mayan « Sacbé » literally the white path, stone ways covered with white limestone stones.
With its airflow column, Casa Merida went back to an original and elemental principle of the vernacular Yucatec architecture, the natural crossed ventilation, which then brought the project to a second question: How is it possible to reach the best self-sufficiency in the middle of a city, without being so dependent of modern technologies, to try to be more responsible with the energy waste management of the place? This next concern took the project towards the idea of disconnecting the house from the city to get better control over it, basically creating a sort of isolated countryside situation in the middle of an urban context. To physically disconnect Casa Mérida from the city, the layout has been modified by switching the social area with the backyard area; sending the living room, kitchen and swimming pool to the end of the land, furthermore the quietest area where the noise of the street doesn't reach you anymore; in order to bring the functional backyard to the front, to use it as a buffer on the city..To culturally reconnect. The project is willing to get rid of the unnecessary, no finishing and no decoration, to only preserve the structural part, as well as only simple materials. Mayan cream stone walls have been built in a traditional way by covering the joints with the stone splinters, typical stone from Yucatán used in antic Mayan pyramids, and temples sites. The brut concrete has also been used for the floors and the walls, definitely industrial but still locally produced in Mérida, the main structural material. Finally, to control the light atmosphere, massive wooden louver windows and doors have been designed. The construction is reaching a 90% made on-site, with local materials and built exclusively by Yucatec masons and carpenters, a sort of modern reinterpretation of what could mean vernacular architecture. Made of massive materials that do not require special treatments or maintenance, accepting aging and time as part of the architecture process, the house has been conceptualized to end up one day covered by a new coat of materiality: a layer of patina. Text description by the architects.
