A Townhouse Development Topped With an Apartment Adds Housing to Tijuana’s Limited Landscape

The open-plan unit on the top floor spills onto a patio that captures sweeping views of the city.

This project was submitted by IKIGAI and has been selected as an Editor’s Pick.

“The city of Tijuana, in the northernmost part of Mexico, next to the city of San Diego, where both cities are divided by one of the busiest borders in the world, functions as one single interdependent ecosystem where high demand of housing plays a major role in their economical growth.

Tijuana is a city that does not follow conventional rules, a metropolis on the edge. The city was Vegas before Vegas, booming through the prohibition era and evolving in a very informal manner.

In the past few years, the city has experienced a major boom in development. This has come in all formats of high density living, mainly mid to large sized towers that pop amongst predominantly single-family houses. For this project we wanted to create a more amicable relationship to the existing fabric of the neighborhood by mimicking the existing patterns of the context, and leveraging the amazing set of local construction skills. The project was designed by T38 Studio an award winning architecture firm based in Mexico and in New York, who has a strong focus on creating better and more accessible housing alternatives to live in cities, it was developed and built by Walden development.

Walden, as a development company, promotes a differentiated way of buying and leasing living spaces in a city where the concept of institutional rental housing is almost non-existent. Through our brand we promote a way of living that fits the current demographics of the city while serving as a catalyst for the creation of community. Our very defined design guidelines and approaches to space guarantee a form of living that is based on bringing beauty through simplicity, this is based on Henry David Thoreau’s life ideology.

In a city where it’s almost impossible to develop single-family houses, except for in the outskirts, we focused creating a horizontal mid-rise development composed by a combination of three bedroom townhouses and one and two bedroom apartments laid out around a central patio that facilitates the creation of community and generates a place for dialogue and exchange for its users. The scale of the project promotes a kinder form of development in a city that in recent years has been ground for numerous vertical densification exercises that take the eyes, and care away from the streets and into more individualistic approaches for living in the city. The open hallways, the shared central patio and the private terraces are all attempts to create a more secure community, one that keeps its eyes on the ground and responds to the vernacular shapes found in the neighborhood.

This specific unit, D3, sits on the top floor of the first phase of the development, which consists of 5 townhouse units and 3 apartments, to be complemented by 5 more townhouses and 12 apartments on the second phase which is currently under construction. The placement of this apartment takes advantage of the amazing cityscape that is afforded by being on top of a hill, seeming to float above the city, in a diverse visual context that makes the unit serve as an example of what can be known of living life at its best. This one bedroom apartment is configured in an L shaped floor-plan with the main living space of kitchen and living room covered by a double height pitched ceiling that abruptly intersects a poured concrete dome over the bedroom.”