Casa Azahares studies the Mexican Northwest countryside and dignifies its most representative scenes: the open door, the mesquite wood that crackles in the night fire, the walnut tree in the distance, the shadows of the steel roof and solid wall.
This project gives a home to the “Madre Tierra” workers, men and women devoted to the land and the lemons, orange, and avocado crops.
The routine of the countryside makes us remember the strength in its simplicity. So we asked ourselves how to translate this endeavor into a space language. This project answers this by splitting the original structure of the typical house into three independent volumes.
This volumetric fragmentation essentially allows the follow-up space benefits:
1. The creation of intersecting pathways.
2. The chance to explore different field views from the center.
3. The birth of a central patio, the heart of the coexistence of the project.
Passive Conditioning Strategies:
One of the hardest challenges was finding a way to protect the users from the direct weather: the high summer temperatures and the cold and windy nights in winter. That’s the reason for the use of specific passive conditioning strategies. A double-deck is built: a steel roof on the upper side, that reduces the thermal gain by shielding it from solar radiation and providing shade to the main roof and external pathways.
The accumulated heat between the decks is dissipated by cross ventilation. On the other side, the inner roof, a concrete slab lightened by polystyrene blocks, works as thermal insulation to regulate the inside temperatures.
To this, we added the flexibility of the volumes to open to the outside. The main volume has an open façade, fully foldable, composed of four gates along its entire length, flanked by slender columns. When opened, natural ventilation is allowed and the line between outside and inside is blurred.
