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Architects: arqaz arquitectura, t-unoauno
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Zaickz Moz
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Manufacturers: Novaceramic
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Lead Architects: Carlos Espinosa, José Luis Araiza, Emilio Zuñiga
Text description provided by the architects. Meloso arose in response to Mexico City’s earthquake on September 19, 2017. Located in the town of San Luis Tlaxialtemalco, it is a town that originated from Mexico City that still preserves vestiges of the pre-Hispanic era such as cultivation on ‘chinampas’ (floating gardens).
This town and Xochimilco’s governorship, in general, were among the most affected by the earthquake. The reconstruction of the government and some foundations is an attack on the memory, a landscape replacement, a substitution of the place with foreign constructions, they have put aside in their design, architectural identity and its inhabitant’s way of occupying associated with their forms of production and their social network that has been consolidated for decades through their patron saint festivities and coexistence in patios and smoke kitchens, imposing a generic housing model that does not take into account its sociocultural context and fractures the customs that give identity to the people.
The furniture refers to and is a tribute to their way of sitting at festivities, which consists in putting wooden planks on stacks of partitions.
Meloso's proposal arises from this reflection, which is why we pick up the thread of the site’s vernacular architecture gestures and take its tectonics up in the use of wide walls and mud that make up the raw material with which the space is intervened, giving new life to the materials and their possibilities of building elements are what make what is built contemporary, but at the same time timeless.
A place that seeks silence and reduces its design to the basics, the somewhat obsessive repetitive use of materials makes a synthesis of simplicity.
