Eucaliptos

65

mexico city, mexico

2004

Architecture envelops, shelters.Therein lies its nobility and power. Urban chaos generates anxiety, and that is why I seek to create spaces that offer peace — spaces for contemplation. With my houses I attempt to isolate the inhabitants from the city, to protect them, to distance them from the noise, to give them an inner order, which is one of the definitions of tranquility. The complement within the city is the possibility of hearing sounds, of living silence.

Functionalism did not contemplate emotional states or certain psychological aspects, despite having emerged during the height of Freudian thought; it did not take into account that spaces can also give rise to emotions — such as joy, nostalgia, sadness, vertigo, claustrophobia, or even panic. Nor did it consider that beauty ultimately proves functional and that we need it as an incentive. Beauty binds us to one another.

During the height of functionalism, it was almost taboo to speak of the spirit in architectural works. Yet today, more than ever, it is essential that the architect touch the emotional dimension.

Joe Fletcher , MAA, Victor Benitez, Nicola Lorusso Photography

MAAText


When architecture moves us, it creates memory; when it fails to express, it generates forgetting. Memory is the most powerful thing an object can produce because it resolves itself in permanence. Spaces can transmit, can communicate in very forceful terms. When architecture generates memory, it transcends time.

It is possible that an architectural work stirs emotions in us when it brings to memory symbols from other times, when it makes us dream through the gaze.

Our childhooda territory of joy and frustration — is at times translated into memories of places and corners of the original home: the space watched over by the mother, the family table we shared; smells, the light of afternoons that were ours alone, sensations etched into our oldest memory. With its aura we live and create, and in some intangible way we reproduce it in many of our acts and even in our work.

When creating a space, I try to preserve the greatest stimuli of joy.

PRoject DEtails

  • Miguel Angel Aragonés

  • Ricardo Cabrera, Daniel Mendiola

  • Joe Fletcher, Nivola Lorusso

  • Jan Hendrix, Xawery Wolski, Claudia Gallegos, Gustavo Perez, Ignacio Van Aersen

  • Mexico city, Mexico

  • 1,200 M2