Articles by Cristobal Rojas

The project undertakes a complete renovation of the rear image of the building, with the construction of 30 new rooms and the remodeling of the facades. The new volumes are placed taking advantage of the original terraced section in order to produce vertical planes, whose slight displacement creates small outdoor spaces for the rooms.

A weekend house, located in one of the hills that create a border around the town of Yaruquí, which is noticeably developed by the new airport of Quito.

Throughout history, we have seeked to satisfy the spatial needs of humankind through architecture, often turning our backs on our primeval home, earth, and thus ignoring that the relationships between the elements of its nature define and determine space, and set the first guidelines for architecture. This project emerges, in a conceptual way, precisely from those relationships and it is inspired in the mutualism that nature can achieve allowing for life to exist even in the harshest of conditions.

The beach is far away. In a “residual” land, without facing the sea and near the untouchable boundary of the mangrove, three volumes contain in this hotel its own aquatic landscape. Three long vegetable roofs shelter the rooms without touching each other. In this way, the ‘palapa’ retains its clear, simple construction. This archaic logic, learned from the Mayan house, allows the walls to be independent from their structural work. The room is sheltered between the water, which sneaks from the flooded patio, in a brief reminder of the mangrove that populates the island of Holbox. Rest under a palapa built with solid cedar and intense aroma, experience as a space, is the premise of all rooms, which for this reason do not allow a second floor.