Iturbide Studio / Taller de Arquitectura Mauricio Rocha + Gabriela Carrillo

Architects: Taller de Arquitectura Mauricio Rocha + Gabriela Carrillo
Location: 1a Cda. Heliotropo 2, Barrio del Niño Jesús, Mexico City, CDMX, Mexico
Design: Mauricio Rocha, Gabriela Carrillo
Collaborators: Rafael Carrillo, Gerson Huerta, Pavel Escobedo, Esterlina Campuzano, Elizabeth Waites, Enrique Ibarra.
Project Year: 2017
Photographs: Rafael Gamo

Models: Francisco Ortiz
Construction: Rafael Carrillo – Taller 499
Structural Engineering: Grupo SAI Gerson Huerta – Ingeniería Estructural Sismoresistente
Mep: Tomás Rodríguez
Client: Graciela Iturbide

Text description provided by the architects. On a plot of 7×14 in the Barrio del Niño Jesús and just a few steps from Graciela Iturbide’s house, a small tower of only three levels extruded in a literal way, extrudes its measurements in plan to become a solid piece of clay that de-constructs before its own materiality in very thin and almost imperceptible tensions of steel.

Inside, three planes of wood, concrete, and marble appear stretched from one side to another creating a pair of voids of multiple heights, probably plagued in the near future by patios with gardens, authorship of its owner.

Their interior facades insinuate in an almost imperceptible way the conditions of the adjacencies that surround them with a sieve that lets or does not pass the light and later become shadows.

The service area, the circulations and the large bookcase are grouped in a vertical element that is integrated into the container walls to practically disappear and only give body to the volume.

A work that above all sought silence, synthesis, continuous, repetitive and almost obsessive use of a single material. A strategic use of the “form” and proportions to make the concrete disappear from the structure and become almost self-supporting.

A work that seeks to be mass and emptiness, an ethereal volume that disappears with light and shadow; that it ceases to be, so that the powerful atmosphere that transpires this woman that we so admire inhabits it and makes it his.