The Casa TEC 205 is located very close to the Chipinque ecological park in Monterrey. This house is the first prize in a raffle organized every year by the Technological University of Monterrey to raise funds for its students. The house design preserves four large extant trees on the site. Now embedded in the house, the trees characterize the spaces they inhabit. Major interior spaces enjoy direct connections to their own corresponding outdoor spaces, each associated with a different landscape and quality of light.
Because the land slopes steeply down from the entry level we were able to invert the conventional arrangement, placing the bedroom floor below the entry floor instead of above. The bedrooms take advantage of the earth’s thermal mass, bringing natural freshness to the house and lowering cooling loads. The rooftop is conceived as a large exterior room delimited by walls and windows that frame the fantastic views of the Monterrey Mountains. In order to gather these outdoor spaces into the project, a series of large wall planes that intersect in the house’s center project into the surrounding outdoor space.
This constructivist assembly allows the walls to be read as independent, plastic elements, effectively blurring the distinction between inside and outside. We have always admired the use of color in Mexico, from its vernacular architecture to that of the masters Luis Barragán and Ricardo Legorreta. We have applied pigments to these walls running inside and outside, emphasizing their autonomy and determining the character of each space.