Quintas

This project emerges as a retreat space at the core of a communal housing community functioning since 1980, in which 13 houses share and coexist within a 12,500 sqm ground located in Cuernavaca: a city known for its privileged weather, leafy panorama and fertile land.

Our project seeks to gift the community with spaces for introspection, wellbeing and recreation in a way that enhances coexistence and harmony between its members and with nature. Trees over 100 years old inhabit in this piece of ground because it used to be a vivarium before being converted to communal housing in the early 80´s. Clay, concrete, stone and water converge in an architecture that embraces and evokes wellness.

The design strategy seeks to blur the limits between the inside and outside. Long concrete roofs overlay over open spaces, daring gravity, to provide cover but not confinement. The inside spaces have clear glass façades from side to side which lets users enjoy the fortunate nature of the site while being inside. The structure conserves apparent concrete slabs that will age proudly in consonance with nature and steel pillar grids that made our design principle of limpid spaces possible.

The building was carefully designed as a subtle insertion, with a foundation that connects it strongly to the soil but ends subtly in cantilevered platforms that hover over the ground and grass with openings that let light in and allow growth of vegetation. Over the years, vegetation will penetrate the built materiality and cause the perception that the building stems from the leaves and hovers over and around them.

Our architecture identifies with its site and with the small community that brought it to reality.