Cube House | Agraz Arquitectos S.C.

Text by Ana Guerrerosantos

“The Cube House empties its interior, throwing itself and conquering the site with its weightlessness: in a geometric game that indicates how volumes hand over against the geometry that draws the light and the topography of the landscape”.

The house as an answer to the place where it settles. On the top of a hill overlooking the creek. This is the way it is organized according to how it naturally exists.

In steep sloping terrain the house poses and divides itself in two strata. In the first the noble spaces are trapped at street level coexisting with the public life of the house. It is here where the ideology of the cabin takes place, the urn, a great space double the height to guarantee the admiration of nature.

Once there, movement occurs, appropriating the shelter in the depth of the terrain, downstairs the cave as a refuge, a space for protection, where bedrooms and intimacy find a place, coexisting peacefully with the view on the garden that fades away while the house rises, reaching its exterior fullness in terrace pathways that feed the imaginary of the dwelling as a place of its own, dominant and protective.

 The purpose of this house is being a literal translation of a tectonic house idea, above a stereotomic one, as a distillation of the essence of architecture. Once again “less is more”.

DATASHEET

Location: Zapopan, Jalisco.

Proyect: 2005

Construction: 2006

Author: Arq. Ricardo Agraz & Agraz Arquitectos S.C.

Construction: Arq. Salvador Aguirre Cordero

Collaborators:

Arq. Beatriz Ramírez Romero.

Arq. Alberto Tacher.

Arq. Sara Tamez.

Wood Work: Esteban Gutiérrez Velazco.

Glass work: Ventalum

Illumination proyect: Ing. Sergio Talancón Crail

Baths: Ramsés Galindo

Stones: Luigi Sasso

Painting: Alejandro Pérez

Interior Design: Scandinavian Design

Photography: Mito Covarrubias

Art: Arq. Hector Navarro.

Site Area: 779.50m2

Building Area: 387.60 m2