Orozco House

A:patio / B:bedroom / C:library / D:living / E:access / F:garage

Project Details

• Project Name: Orozco House
• Client: Gabriel Orozco
• Project Type: A house for an artist
• Principal Designers: Fernando Romero and Juan Pablo Maza
• Design Team: Derek Dellecamp, Victor Jaime, Gerardo Broissin, Adriana Lara
• Date of Commencement of Project: 1999
• Location of site: Tepoztlan, Edo. de Mex., Mexico
• Built-up Area: 325 m²

A:master bedroom toilet / B:studio

Level + 3.0 m, level +5.0 m and level + 6.7 m (bottom-up)

Words from the architect

One day we had a talk with the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco who told us he was planning to leave the city and move to a quieter town. We proposed to design a house for him. Shortly after he came to our office and we started designing together. We took the Farnsworth House of Mies Van der Rohe built in 1943 as a reference point for the project . We stacked the various parts of Mies' floor plan in a different way, connected them with surfaces and defined a new geometric volume. We had used the same system for another house developed in OMA, Y2K, where unifying different geometries results in an evolving skin. This previous project was crucial in the design process of the house. Bit-by-bit we transformed the volume, until it finally turned into an already existing morphology: an egg or a riverstone. The client was delighted with this form since it always had been present in the production of his artwork.

Sections

Challenges

History of architecture is both a combination of realism (functionalism) and utopia. We wanted to combine our interest in organic architecture with a rational system. Every key villa in history has produced surprise and terror in its time. Modernity is no longer interesting for housing projects, because it doesn't translates today's reality. We should avoid a symmetrical structure, as sites and situations are strongly asymmetric.

Realization

The artist doubted between building this house or buying an apartment in Paris. Paris won.

Parameters

• Program: A house for the artist and his future family.
• Restrictions: None.
• Site: Next to the Tepozteco (magical mountain), surrounded by intense vegetation.
• Location: Tepoztlan, between Cuernavaca and Mexico City.
• Year: 1999

Client

• Ambitions: To enjoy the possibility of imagining a experimental house.
• Profile: Visionary artist with high analytical capacity.

Credits

• Text and Photographs: Courtesy, the Architect
• Compiled by: Mitesh Saraf