Archello Awards 2026 · Enter your projects before 30 September 2026
Archello Awards 2026 · Enter your projects before 30 September 2026

Social Green house

Located in the city of Queretaro, Social Green House an 85 sqm construction intended as a fresh solution to the horizontal social housing developments in Mexico. It uproots on an 8 x 16m plot at the outskirts of modern Queretaro, one of the fastest growing Mexican urban areas because of its strategic location in the country and its paradisiac calm compared to other cities, generating in it a moral renewal environment that facilitates the implementation of this open house. The project generated in an orthogonal box, has a basic but complete plant, which has been subtracted on two areas to build the cube of stairs and service yard, the rarity is its extraordinary mezzanine height 3.20 m which reminds us the old pre-modern mezzanine houses. This mezzanine is only the first of three actions to make it bioclimatic and avoid the use of air conditioning, the second is the implementation of a roof garden that provides shade on the entire slab and the third is composed by four double facade louvers that protect and tinted shade ranging from floor to ceiling. The double facade louvers completely fold down and combined with the aluminum sliding doors who allows the interior space to fully disclosed to the outside, making the project much more versatile, suitable for recreational activities, generates greater transparency and is an incentive to recover the concept of "neighborhood and community," missing elements in much of contemporary housing developments. The system is completely traditional construction, no element needs a highly skilled workforce to do it, the materials are the same as always, block walls, beam and vault slabs, stairs folded steel plate, engineered flooring, gypsum plaster, aluminum doors and windows, which makes this approach economically viable within the parameters of social housing. Finally the slab top with roof garden gives us another 85 sqm that can be customized, either as an outdoor terrace, deck for exercise and sustainable gardening, raising substantially the quality of life of its members.

Project credits

Architects

Project data

Location
Mexico
Project Year
2012
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