Excerpt: Casa Paseo de los Estudiantes, designed by Dear Architects, is a single-family house that achieves a sentiment of shelter. It simultaneously shows the sincerity of where it is placed, its cultural past, and the roughness given by the conditions involved. This conditions make this truthfulness what makes the personality and gives character, not trying to achieve meaning by a false sense of empty preconceived protected beauty.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by Architect] Casa Paseo de los Estudiantes is a single family house designed by the awareness and interpretation of the notion that a house should achieve a sentiment of shelter but simultaneously allowing to show the sincerity of where it is placed, its cultural past and the roughness given by the conditions involved, making this truthfulness what makes the personality and gives character, not trying to achieve meaning by a false sense of empty preconceived protected beauty.
The place where the project is built is a plot of 189 m2, product of a subdivision of a bigger area that dwells a house from the 1970’s in a consolidated and elderly community district with neighboring houses built during the 70’s and 80’s with local reinterpretations of brutalism, prairie houses, and eclecticism permitted by postmodernism.
The 330 m2house designed for rent responds to the densification of the area that begins to blossom again, younger families created a demand who want to live in the neighborhood because of its large parks and location, running away from the option of living in the far away suburbs and newer anodyne communities. The design responds with contemporary flexible open spaces and with a language according to the areas’ nature and a tight budget of 458.50 USD per m2.
The intention of our interpretation is clear, to continue the local culture and blend in its context reinterpreting it. We respond to this situation with two main actions; raising the volume and enclosing the site at street level for multiple programs, parking, garden, barbecues that in other ways would have left less open space for recreation. And the second one is the structure strategy treatment to make it cheaper with an efficient, and repetitive criteria. This structure made is expressed in apparent concrete beams and columns making it flexible to cover with “boards” the space between them according to the program need or orientation. The boards are distinguished in three ways. The roughcast used in the street and back facade reinterprets the finish of many of the neighboring 70’s and 80’s houses giving the house a raw presence. The smooth outside plaster finish painted in soft green gives way to for other elements to be protagonist, and the inside boards are covered with gypsum plaster painted in even lighter green leaving the structure out to read it from the inside.
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