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Architects: R-Zero Studio
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Photographs:Aki Itami
Text description provided by the architects. In the southern part of Mexico City, on an irregular plot of land which offers just a few meters of front façade, this one-family residence solves the lack of contact with its environment by producing its own context, unfolding itself around a self-created landscape.
A decreasing succession of scale grants character to the interior space, beginning with the access through a triple-height patio wrapped in glass and cement blocks framing the sky as a landscape above. By night, this landscape is reproduced on the walls of the main stairway with a set of lights that reminds of a constellation.
Access to the public areas is granted through a double-height space which immediately denotes the sensation of lightness and transparency that prevails throughout the entire residence. The contrast between solid elements embellished with texture and complete transparency, offers a very clear understanding of the way the house functions, so the location of service areas, stairways and leisure spaces are easily sensed by the user.
Semi-public and private areas possess a more intimate scale and like in the rest of the house, are flooded with sunlight.
Through the formal simplicity of the built spaces, the architecture stands aside and gives away the lead role of the project to the main stage of the client´s activities: the garden. The use of unfinished materials (cement blocks, steel, wood, glass and concrete on the façade) links the building with its natural context, conferring personality to this architecture –the space container–, which at the same time contains the exterior space. Seen from the garden, the transparency of the interior facades unveils the activities within the house, erasing the limits between interior and exterior, merging as a whole the built with the un-built.