moneo brock's colorful casa TEC 205 in monterrey is a homage to mexican architecture

moneo brock‘s casa TEC 205 is located very close to the chipinque ecological park, an urban landscape dominated by the sierra madre, omnipresent backdrop to the city of 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.

moneo brock’s casa TEC 205 is located very close to the chipinque ecological park in monterrey

the house design follows a number of complementary motives. the first, it could be said, was to preserve four large extant trees on the site, three walnuts and a trueno. in a context where house developments often raze all remnants of a prior life on a site, madrid based design studio moneo brock has decided to not just preserve these trees, but to make them part of the project. since the house occupies approximately half of the site, and because the trees are distributed across its slope, the house necessarily surrounds and frames them. now embedded in the house, the trees definitively characterize the spaces they inhabit.

the design studio has decided to not just preserve these trees, but to make them part of the project

the second motive was to open up the public spaces to the sky and the views, and to maximize the area of green space in those parts of the site not occupied by the building’s footprint. because the land slopes steeply down from the entry level moneo brock has been able to invert the conventional arrangement, placing the bedroom floor below the entry floor instead of above. this has various advantages. the bedrooms take advantage of the earth’s thermal mass, bringing natural freshness to the house and lowering cooling loads during the many months of high temperatures in monterrey. this arrangement allows the more public floor to enjoy the better views that it’s higher position affords and provides direct access to the garden for all the bedrooms.

this house won a raffle organized by the technological university of monterrey to raise funds for its students

a final consequence of this arrangement is that the outdoor public areas, the pool and grill and outdoor entertaining space, is shifted off the ground plane and onto the roof. the roof terrace is accessible directly from the street entry, from the more private breakfast terrace off the family room, and from inside the house by way of the main stair. it is conceived as a large exterior room, delimited by walls and windows that frame the fantastic views of the monterrey mountains.

moneo brock places the bedroom floor below the entry floor instead of above

a third motive has been that each major interior space of the house should enjoy a direct connection to its own corresponding outdoor space, be it a garden, a patio or a terrace. by this means, each room is associated with a different landscape, giving it a unique character and an individual light, be it reflected, direct or filtered. in order to gather the outdoor spaces into the project, a series of large wall planes intersect in the house’s center and project into the surrounding outdoor space, creating large surfaces that run continuously between the interior and the exterior spaces of the house.

the pigments applied to walls run inside and outside, determining the character of each space

rather than creating an architecture of discreet closed volumes, this constructivist assembly allows the walls to be read as independent, plastic elements and their transgression of the building enclosure effectively blurring the distinction between inside and outside space. having always admired the use of color in mexico, from its vernacular architecture to that of the masters luis barragán and ricardo legorreta, moneo brock has applied strong colors to these walls not only because the studio typically uses color in its work, but as recognition and homage to this great heritage as well.

in the interior of the house, the color has been the protagonist again