How do you design a home for the people you love? To work from active memory, with an inner fire fused with the spirit of the place, became the guiding compass of this project.

The commission began as a discovery at number one hundred thirty-eight. The design process started by selecting the lot for the owner.

The client’s original requests stemmed from the desire to free the house from adjoining boundaries, for practical day-to-day living and the natural maintenance a home requires, while fulfilling the essential needs of a family of three.

From this, the manifesto of the project and its construction was established under the following principles: never falsify reality, work from memory (emotionally charged, inhabitable spaces), and embrace the fortunate accident in decision-making. To improvise with craft is to play jazz.

The score of the house consists of moving around the dwelling along its perimeter, then entering a scheme reminiscent of a train car or an ark anchored in the landscape. Sliding elements open to expand the spaces or close to contract them (systole and diastole), the pulse of the house. The ground floor is composed of an entrance hall or office with a full bathroom, and the heart of the house: the public spaces that filter through the entire section.

The kitchen, living room, and dining room rise toward a loft-study on the upper floor, and on the top level a polyvalent space serves as a gathering place on the roof garden, aligned on an eastern compositional axis that frames the Pyramid of Cholula with the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Remedies.

The atmosphere is tied to spatial density and the plastic memory of materials, circular time in dialogue with linear time. To understand that all things have a beginning and an end, through the paradox of day and night, the seasons of the year. The blossoming of things, the small details, beauty, the mystery of penumbra to discover wonder in the fissures of the windows, the rejoicing of light. To inhabit time.