American studio Young & Ayata and the Mexican studio Michan Architecture have collaborated to design a residential building with seven apartments named “DL1310 Apartments”. DL1310 building is located in the town of Tetelpan, in the Álvaro Obregón mayor’s office, the third most populous mayor’s office in Mexico City, Mexico. Text description provided by the architects. This project is a residential building in Mexico City consisting of seven 1-2 bedroom apartments with basement parking. It was decided from the beginning that the construction system would be cast-in-place concrete, that the unit types would be simple and direct, and that the building would maximize the site footprint and allowed height. These were limitations that satisfied the client’s desires and allowed us to focus our efforts on an interesting opportunity in the project: the openings.
The site strategy led the two side elevations towards the lot lines, making standard windows undesirable. To allow light, views, and ventilation on all sides of the building, a scheme was developed to manipulate the windows into something familiar but subtly different. Rectangular windows rotate on the building’s façade, resulting in two ruled surfaces at the top and bottom and transforming the window into an inverted trapezoidal bay. As the windows rotate inward, the slabs appear to pull at the head and sill. This results in a façade that is extremely forceful in its flatness and also a dynamic bas-relief of soft, undulating shadows. These windows also produced different interior moments as the changing façade matched the design of the standardized unit. Views from the interior became small events of forced oblique perspective as one looked both outward and to the street at the same time, making each unit unique as it approached the enclosure.
The design process for the openings was guided by both iterative digital models and research into the history of ruled concrete surfaces in Latin American architecture. Several large-scale models allowed us to find a tectonic articulation that used board-formed concrete as an integral expression of the opening concept. The final methodology used traditional construction techniques combined with reusable fiberglass casting modules to produce an alternative expression between digital technology and construction traditions. The lot constraints, typical of this urban neighborhood, drove the initial design decisions. The sloped, mid-block site is sandwiched between two existing single-family homes, both with the potential for accommodating vertical construction in the future.
