Cordoba Architects Association

Córdoba, Veracruz, 2012

The project is defined by five main objectives:

1. To suggest and propose a project for the neighboring park.
2. To rebuild and complete the block materializing the site’s limits in a simple and contemporary form.
3. To generate a façade-skin that communicates, suggests, connects and contains.
4. To compact the design toward the margins of the site in order to free up more indoor-outdoor space near the bow.
5. To generate a triangular open-contained protected space, a semi-public private atrium, that works as an extrusion of the interior and that also operates as a filter space within the urban context.
6. To generate dialogue and connection between the architectural piece and the urban setting.

We strive for a design action that operates on two levels: the architectural piece and the urban dimension. The volume is ordered, geometrized, materialized and completed; then it is elevated, creating an open, semi-contained garden. This implies the prolongation and extension of the neighboring park; thus making the building operate as an architectural device that converses with and contributes to the urban context. With this design strategy, we avoid “dominating” the site’s altimetry, making the most of it in order to build spatial and natural continuity.  The empty volume and its “floating wall” define a public-private atrium, a space that is intentionally dual. The “hanging architecture garden” filters into the programmatic nucleus, which is compacted and attached to the site’s limits.

The program is resolved on three levels with as much efficiency and compactness as possible. On the boundary line there is a great circulation in the shape of a ramp that dominates the space illuminated from above. This ramp connects but could also serve as an exhibition space. The three levels open up to the hanging garden. On the ground floor, the mixed-use room opens out toward the garden, allowing for visual and physical connection and integrating the garden during events (presentations, receptions, etc.), turning the entire space into an urban garden-atrium or an “open-contained cloister”. The “floating wall”, a defined design gesture that dominates the project’s geometry; its “tectonic weight” plays dialectically with its floating condition so that the ambiguous indoor-outdoor, intensifying the open-contained experience.

Área de proyecto

684 m²

Tipo

Edificio privado

Cliente

Cordoba Architects Association

Status

Construido

Alcances

Conceptual design