- Area: 2550 m²
- Year: 2016
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Photographs:Onnis Luque, Camila Cossío
Text description provided by the architects. Jardín San Hipólito is a garden venue with capacity for a thousand people, located in a property of 3 hectares of wooded area on the outskirts of Mexico City. The site has housing potential, and will be developed within 10 years, which is why one of the most important premises of the competition was to design and build a removable and lightweight structure.
With that peculiarity, the design still harnesses and utilizes the natural components of the wooden landscape, guaranteeing a direct connection with the surrounding environment.
The project is composed by 3 tents: the main one, designed to serve as a main space for a diverse range of events, covers 1000 sqm (40 x 25 meters), which is free of columns and floored with a concrete slab equipped with a radiating heating system that creates a warm atmosphere; and two smaller adjacent tents of 250 m2 each, which lodge bathrooms and a kitchen, respectively. Service areas, facilities, accommodations, storage and landscaped areas are featured as well.
To curb the prevailing winds and avoid a sail effect inside the main tent, natural slopes were erected to shape and frame the perimeter of the site by reusing and repurposing the materials resulting from the excavations and weeding of the land, anchoring the project to its context.
The tents were assembled with a tensed plastic membrane and a digitally designed and manufactured lightweight steel structure with IPR beams with 80cm cambers that are pinned/screwed in intersecting 45 degrees. The main structure’s highest point and height at the intersection is 17 meters.
