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Architects: Alejandro D'Acosta
- Area: 240 m²
- Year: 2016
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Photographs:Onnis Luque
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Lead Architect: Alejandro D´Acosta Lopez
Text description provided by the architects. Casa del Mar is the retirement home for a couple, facing the Pacific Ocean on a 195 m2 parcel in La Misión, Baja California, Mexico. It consists of a simple program: two rooms, a study, a library, and a common space. In a limited area, the public and private areas had to be divided into two levels linked by the lobby. The slight slope of the terrain is used to configure the sections: the lobby remains at street level; the public area is raised to frame the views of the sea and the private area is partially excavated to generate privacy and an intimate relationship with the gardens. The construction is a complex configuration of different systems, a mixture of crafts and industry, tradition and innovation; contemporary indigenism. Site soil, metal, excavation stone, second-use wood.
The perimeter walls are 50cm thick rammed earth walls, falsework on the inside with old petatillo sheets to achieve a print of the texture on the ground once it’s dried. While the falsework on the external side - the one that faces perpendicular to the sea wind - is covered with a reconfiguration of the bahareque as a construction system to provide protection to the earth, Palo de arco is a wood that grows at Sierra de la Giganta in southern Baja and is used for tomato cultivation in San Quintín. This same stick, once discarded from the crop, was used as a lost falsework and a protective skin for the walls, preventing adobe degradation in the face of constant ocean humidity. At first, the perimeter was evenly covered with sticks for absolute shade. Once the shadow is understood, the silence has been studied, without altering the continuous arrangement of the sticks, omissions are generated where the light will come in, gardens will be contemplated, and wind will transit. These old stick walls, which are repeated vertically on one wall, and horizontally on another, create the pattern of old skin that wrinkles due to the irregularity of the rods and ages with them.
A skin that adheres to the flesh that is the earth that creates shadows that have become uneven when the sun passes, that vibrates the view, sees time, deterioration. Matteric, tactile skin that will lose its color, but will use old age in favor of the house when protecting, avoiding constant maintenance. Building with earth is to remember; letting the heart teach to the hands, recognizing the indigenous we are, taking up old knowledge, continuing the link, and fulfilling our role. In a construction exercise with a mixed system, synthesizing the parts is key to maintaining the neatness of a home designed to hug, contemplate, to love. Doing what is correct, avoiding noise, and exaggeration. Harmonize the components from the idea of the minimum and build a symphony of omissions, a house that sings from its silences. Casa del Mar is to design deterioration harmonized in its context. "I remember the painter Francisco Toledo when we designed a garden and he painted a wall with a very fine adobe mixture, almost talc, without any type of sealant. What he was looking for was not to paint the wall, but when it rains tears from the earth will remain as a red bleed on the floor” The idea of old age, designing deterioration, and causality in construction, must sensitize our relationship with a changing and inclement landscape, in the management of materials in their context and their consequences. Understand that architecture is also temporary, a place to experience retirement; a space to suddenly, one day, stop being.
