Suspended Concrete | Brutalist House

Casa Altanera is located in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, México. The lot has an area of ​​2,500m2, with minimum slope. It was established as a natural and essential order of the project to follow up on the reforestation process of the area, contributing to the regenerative process that we find in our context. A single-family housing scheme was developed, contained in three separate operating modules, distributed among social areas and two pieces that interact independently, solving a program of areas for a master bedroom for two people and four secondary rooms for eight people, including your individual and shared service areas. The interaction with the exterior was proposed through the areas that develop in the palapa. The dining room, the kitchen, the living room, the deck, and the pool, are linked together in a common space, while each unfolds from its movable facade of wooden doors, resolving climate relationships independently and sustainably. The most intimate and contemplative connection happens in the pieces of concrete and wood that contain the rooms, suggesting a protected, safe place, in which, each inhabitant would individually define the type of link with its immediate exterior, from its reading of the place.

This project was a full renovation of a 1970’s ranch house. The original house was chopped into multiple small, disconnected spaces. In the nineties a large and awkwardly placed addition was built to capitalize on the lake view. FORWARD was tasked with trying to navigate the constraints of the existing condition along with negotiating the desires of the artist clients, one of whom wanted a contemporary minimal interior while the other, a collector, was more interested in the distinct rooms of the turn-of-the-century houses. The finished house is a series of discreet rooms that are continuously linked. The entry space acts as a gallery and has been widened to create a clear relationship to the addition. What had been the original house has now been divided into kitchen, a combined living/dining room, and an office/guest bedroom. In the bedroom wing, a new master was created out of two smaller existing bedrooms. The house acts as a container for the owner’s collections. It is contemporary, minimal and spatially open, but at the same time affords the distinction of traditional rooms.