Mexico Metropolis-based architect Ludwig Godefroy designed a brutalist concrete vacation dwelling in a Mexican pine forest known as Casa Alférez.
Accomplished in 2023 within the Alférez area, about an hour exterior of Mexico Metropolis, sits a stark two-bedroom weekend dwelling with whimsical kinds and particulars.
“The origin of the idea of Alferez home comes from the thought of a cabin within the woods and its romantic feeling of ​​a protecting shelter in the course of the forest,” Godefroy mentioned. “I needed the home to seem like a dice that crashed on the ground among the many bushes.”
From the surface, the dice appears impenetrable, a strong board-formed mass with mismatched ornamentations.
An angled wall creates a barrier alongside the entry walkway in entrance of the door and a heavy, swooping awning ideas up on the nook of the home, whereas pencil-thin vertical home windows and petal-shaped openings puncture the facade.
The home was designed like a vault – remoted from the remainder of the world in a distant forest panorama – with a way of safety and brutalist safety via the solidity of the concrete that protects and cares for its inhabitants.
The bottom flooring has excessive home windows that maintain sightlines and entry away from the ground-floor perimeter of the home. The inside areas are all oriented upwards to the sky and surrounding treetops.
The poured-in-place concrete construction is balanced playfully on the sloping topography, balancing the burden of the fabric with the weightlessness of the areas.
“The home appears dropped like an unstable field on high of the pure slope of the land, cantilevered on its south nook, and sunken on the other north nook,” mentioned Godefroy.
As a result of difficult terrain, the plan prioritizes top over width, choosing a compact, stacked footprint measuring 81 sq. meters (870 sq. ft) moderately than an costly and invasive sprawling basis.
Godefroy determined to “develop the peak of the home to create a second floor flooring on high of the home, the suspended rooftop terrace in the course of the bushes.”
Constructed on a sq. plant, the areas are configured “in half ranges organized round a double top, giving the home this cathedral feeling and proportion on the within, with gentle coming into all over the place from the highest, via these very excessive home windows and skylights within the ceiling,” he continued.
Mild diffuses down the concrete partitions via the double-height front room, illuminating the areas with out home windows on the bottom flooring.
Composed of 5 half-levels the rooms act as a collection of mezzanine ranges, with built-in concrete furnishings and picket completed flooring, whose skinny profile is seen on the sting of the stair treads.
The fenestrations are paying homage to Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut with seemingly unrelated shapes and scales that contradict the depth of the concrete mass.
The rooftop terrace – meant because the morning area – has a mixture of geometries with a spherical protruding skylight and an angled ramping type that caps the inside staircase.
In 2018, Godefroy created one other fortress-like dwelling for an oceanside retreat in Oaxaca – and in 2020, he accomplished a fractured concrete dwelling impressed by sacred Mayan roads in Mérida, Mexico.
The pictures is by Rory Gardiner.
