We understand architecture as a logical, simple and effective response to its natural and cultural environment. After a careful evaluation, we seek to bring solutions with adaptable designs that can stand the test of time and achieve a lower consumption of resources.
A skin of exposed brick, a local material that with its traditional double-wall construction technique, achieves very good thermal insulation and a very low maintenance façade finish. Three northern facing exposed concrete frames interrupt this skin of bricks on the main facade, in order to contain and protect the openings while also resolving the balconies. All building installations and service spaces were located on the south façade.
In the corner the volume retracts and generates a large public space that gives rise to a new protagonist in the neighborhood: a sweetgum tree whose colors will mark the passage of time. This deciduous tree will help regulate sunlight in the different seasons. This also allows greater visibility for the commercial space located on the ground floor.
Being a small building with few units, we sought to reduce the common spaces to a minimum due to the maintenance that this implies. For this same reason, we proposed an inaccessible roof, resorting to the traditional corrugated sheet metal roof, simplifying the construction and the pluvial system, which is better adapted to the local climate. The slope of this type of roof was used to give a greater height to the typologies of the top floor.
Because of the corner lot and its northern-facing location, we could give a very good orientation to all the units with cross ventilation in most of them.
The standard floor is made up of two one-room apartments and a small study in the center, which can potentially be combined to achieve a larger unit. This gives the construction process more flexibility in a market as complex and changing as ours.
In order to optimize the energy consumption of the building, it was decided to work with a central heating and hot water system provided by only two boilers (by condensation) for the entire building, thus reducing the maintenance cost per unit. A thermostat and a flowmeter allows us to control and measure individual consumption.
By doing this, we achieve a building with a simple and traditional construction design that optimizes both its technical and design variables for lower levels of wear and tear as well as lower resource consumption in its lifetime.
