Casa en Mercedes is located on a lot in a Costa Rican middle-class residential neighborhood that has remained vacant for a long time, preserving some of the last observable features of the area before it became heavily urbanized (its unaltered topography, vegetation that has returned), and it is strongly defined by what has been built around it, one of those “utopian places where normative ideas about the use of private property are brought into question,” according to artist Lara Almarcegui. The project seeks to maintain that latent discrepant condition, by making both the lot and the building legible in autonomy and correspondence at the same time, marked by the strong presence of edges, the gentle reshaping of the terrain, and the roof as a repetition of the original slope, though now folded to form volumes that fit between their neighbors. The original way of entering and moving through the lot is also preserved, through a series of ascending floor levels that contribute to the physically active lifestyle of the owner, an IT professional who works and trains at home.
The neighboring buildings are made of low-cost materials, such as metal sheets. In particular, the structure adjacent to the back (and highest part) of the lot had a dominant presence, which was incorporated into the new house as one more plane in the composition, thanks to the setback of the new volumes, also built with corrugated metal sheets.
The house is simple in plan and complex in section. Its configuration is based on a geometric order that uses 3.05 meters as a base unit, generating a room layout that negotiates the double slope of the terrain while providing a combination of spatial fluidity and privacy (only one interior door is used in the entire house). The roof—set close to the floor levels to define spaces and corrugated to allow room for lofts—contributes to the privacy gradient but also helps create alignments and framings that allow diagonal views from each space into all others. It also helps guide the breeze from the neighboring river linear park from the street toward the highest point of the house.
The structure is a continuation of the interest in the result of construction as an inventory of materials organized by origin and degree of industrialization, favoring those that are renewable, inexhaustible, local, and affordable, and their employment through simple techniques such as basic assembly and stacking. Stone is used for perimeter walls that provide porosity and thermal inertia and also to confine the floor platforms with cyclopean masonry walls. On top of these, teak wood frames are placed along with the roof cladded with corrugated metal and pine boards. All materials are preserved using environmentally responsible methods, for example, through wood charring and natural oil finishes.
