As part of a Tec de Monterrey initiative, this year the First Prize of the 213th Traditional Tec Draw is being held with a work by the Chilean architect who won the 2016 Pritzker Prize, Alejandro Aravena. Elemental House, is the second of the Houses of the 75th Anniversary of Sorteos Tec, which is celebrated this year.
Description sent by the design team. This house was developed to contribute to the solidarity project of the TEC raffle. Through the sale of lottery tickets, whose first prize is a house, the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey raises funds to grant scholarships to students who cannot pay for their studies. The TEC has done this more than 200 times so the brief has been refined to the point that we received a very precise program and a very precise area: not more than 600m2 and not less than 600m2.
We faced multiple fronts for the design, one of which was typological. We have always been struck by the double condition of castles: they are fortresses turned inwards, protecting something inside that we cannot see and simultaneously they are a strong, monumental, abstract presence in the world. Castles are introverted, but not shy.
We wanted to capture some of that in this house: a place that almost silently takes care of private life and at the same time a place that is inevitably a declaration of principles in public life. A concentric structure appeared to be the most synthetic way of responding to this double condition through a single operation. But it was also the most straightforward way to respond to an irregular plot with contradictory geometry and orientations. We opted for a silhouette able to respond to all directions.
On the other hand, although we agreed to strictly comply with the areas established in the brief, we wanted to expand each of its programmatic components as much as possible. So, for example, by lifting the volume from the ground, the size of the public areas of the house match practically the size of the whole lot. Another example is the master bedroom: its size is exactly the one defined in the brief and consequently stops at the equator of the circumference. But from the point of view of the spatial experience, it reaches further to the entire perimeter of the structure. The same thing happens with the central vertical void: despite being a very tight transparent volume, a single glance allows to cover the whole height of the house, from the ground floor to the open sky.
We also wanted to put in practice, some lessons extracted from Mexican architecture, specifically regarding the most pertinent strategies in environmental and climatic terms. That’s why, although the geometry may be unprecedented, the fact that it is an architecture of walls that places the thermal mass on the perimeter is linked to what has traditionally identified the best Mexican architecture.
For the rest, we simply used, with as much care and virtue as possible, the knowledge available at this point in the history of housing: Kahn's relationships between servant and served spaces, Robin Evans's public and private circuits of daily life, or the spatial plan of Loos.
Location: Monterrey, México
Architects: ELEMENTAL (Alejandro Aravena, Gonzalo Arteaga, Víctor Oddó, Diego Torres, Juan Cerda)
Leader Architect: Juan Cerda
Team: André Barros, Carla Donato, Diego Teran, Mara Cruz, Federica Tebaldi (iluminación)
Structural engineering: SODICO ingeniería y Diseño – Raúl y Jorge Santos
Constructor: EDAGA - Homero Galindo
Interior architecture: Línea Vertical – Ana Landa
Structure and Materials
Reinforced concrete, cement brick, glass
Land area: 568 m2
Project Year: 2020-2021
Construction Year: 2021-2022
For more information visit Sorteos Tec.
