Ucello / Nicolás Vásquez

Architects: Nicolás Vásquez
Location: San Juan Mixcoac Neighborhood, México City, Mexico
Project Year: 2012
Photographs: Onnis Luque

Project Area: 619 sqm
Collaborators : Rodrigo de la Garza, Ernesto Lomelí, Rosalía Yuste
Engineering: Enrique Ávalos, BSW Ingenieros
Construction: N.V. Helmut Balle, Rosalía Yuste
Client: Alejandro Zenzes, Rodrigo de la Garza
Charge: $ 460,000 USD

The context where this building is located, is an area where the soil is raw material for making bricks, where a clay pit used to be. We still find some traces of this industrial activity, as evidenced by the sunken park. Therefore, the material that defines the nature of the building is brick.

The project exhibits its “pieces” through different architectural solutions, multiple but logical, thus showing the naturalness of the instruments that compose the architecture and construction processes.

The building contains three maisonettes in a field of 9 meters wide by 18 meters deep, with a Capulín (a wild tree that gives small fruits) located right in the middle of the property. The schema of these three small maisonettes (two in two levels) refer to spatial queries raised by Le Corbusier.

The project is a tectonic experimentation, which shows what is supported, private, public, and useful, all from Kahn´s logic.

Through the use of brick and its relation with the steel structure, a vigorous reference is made to the place and to some buildings in the area. The contrasting relation between these two materials is established with the help of a concrete vault system, adapted from the front of the property division into nine equal parts (91.5 inches) and three bays of approximately five meters deep.

The glass in the windows tightens the abstract relationship between the windows and the brick, giving the building a contrasting balanced character.

The connection to the street is accomplished with a porch that is generated to solve the access to the parking lot located in a semi-basement. This gate is defined by a marquee / jardiniere that articulates and separates the rooms of the first apartment from the main entrance and into the street, giving privacy because it is just 1.80 meters above the sidewalk.