The House in Chihuahua is part of a golf club community in the desert like northern region of Mexico. The dwelling was designed to accommodate the special climatic circumstances of the area, since the differences between day time and night time temperatures can vary by as much as twenty degrees. To balance these extreme temperature differences, we partially buried the house into the mountain slope to take advantage of the soil’s thermal mass.
Since the plot is situated in a traditional style allotment, one of the community rules stated that at least 80% of the roofs had to be inclined, so people wouldn’t build’ ‘modern’ architecture. We reinterpreted that rule and made the complete roof as one continuous surface with different inclinations. From the street side the building is only perceived as a single height volume, but upon entering this seemingly simple volume, the circulation spirals down and spaces become more complex in their shape and conformation.
-joel
