Weekend House

Malinalco is a place that has strong ties to its past regarding different cultural aspects. One of those is Architecture: adobe construction and wood structures are an integral part of the physical realm. From the beginning of the conceptual phase of the project, we wanted the house to belong to this built tradition although that did not necessarily mean that the spatial relations should be traditional in a strict sense of the word.

The house is discovered step by step. To the exterior it shows itself rather closed and anonimous. From the street it is difficult to discern what the user is about to find. It is by going through the main gate that the logic of the house is revealed, framed by walls that create a distorted perspective which make the objects appear closer than they are.

The main space of the house is a square patio, which is entered diagonally. This motion divides the house in two areas, a public and a private one. The public area is intimately linked to the outside: the functions are duplicated between the inside and the outside so that the user can have total freedom to organize his routine depending on the weather.

The house in Malinalco expresses itself in a language that has been present for centuries in Mexico’s culture through solutions that are profoundly rooted in the present.