Text description provided by the architects. Valle de Guadalupe, in Baja California, is the area of the greatest real estate speculation in Mexico, and architecture, although temporary, has the ability to provide answers and mindfully alleviate this avid idleness.
Casa Elías is actually the prelude to a future project. A temporary cabin with a simple program: To house the owners and developers of the future project who aren't native to the area. But above all, it fulfils an extra function by way of a decree that nobody asked for: to relate the developers intimately and inevitably to the site and its context, to be not only a house but an observation and research station of the landscape.
The highest point of one of the three hills that make up the project area was chosen as the location, and an elevated structure on stilts was made to give amplitude to the views, in addition to leaving the land almost intact so as not to intervene as an obstacle in future plans.
Being a temporary house, the project had to be designed making sense of its functionality, but more importantly, its symbolic context. The house was built with an old classroom of the same origin as mobile homes, prefabricated and assembled structures. The classrooms are made up of two sections equivalent to a mobile home, which have to be separated into two parts to be transported and then reassembled on site. On this occasion, the sections were not joined in parallel but at an angle of ninety degrees so that each one had its own orientation and generated a terrace of contemplation between the two bodies.
By nature, one of the faces of each section is of an open character, with no wall, tied together with an equal structure generating a clear space without internal walls. These wallless faces, exposed by the angular opening, are covered with a lot of recycled doors and windows from the United States. Some placed vertically, others horizontally, like puzzles that take shape in juxtaposition, without cutting any of them, some even protruding from the level of the roof. The windows and old doors that rise above the roof level are, due to their orientation, the shadow that makes the terrace habitable, the shelter from the sun that makes the architecture dynamic.
There are projects that blend in with the environment, that study its nature with its shapes, colours and textures. There are projects that hide, that speak of sensitivity to the terrain. To ascend completely and touch only what is necessary on the site is an act of respect for the earth, but also perhaps a slight aggression to the landscape, in the point of veiw of the observer.
There are projects that are sustained from their meaning, from their close relationship with contextual phenomena, be it migratory temporality or rolling aesthetics from another environment that is naturally dissolving in the daily panorama.
