Located in the outskirts of the city of Monterrey, Casa Ventura is a house sitting in the foothills of one of the most imponent mountain ranges of the northern region of Mexico.
The family who commissioned us with the project, initially consisting of two adults and three children (eventually becoming six), sought to challenge the fundamental traditions of families like theirs in the city of Monterrey and decided to get rid of any spatial configuration that would impose a hierarchical structure in their family dynamic.
Our challenge became to devise a domestic space that would avoid any social preconception of how a house for a family should be while seamlessly integrating into the dramatic surrounding topography. These premises guided our formal exploration towards a program tailored for a family that understands their domestic life as a series of interdependent care activities. To achieve this, the difference of levels in the house responds solely to the topography, ensuring that each room is no more than two or three steps away from the next.
When imagining this house, we did so with the idea that its design should be informed and deformed by the mountain in which it is situated. Confronted with challenging natural limitations, we proposed a geometric strategy in which each space was drawn within a pentagon, a shape relatively easy to adapt to the organic contours of the site, while maintaining the possibility of connection with adjacent pentagons – or spaces.
Casa Ventura was conceived out of the necessity to challenge the current predefined notions of domesticity that impose a standardized way of living. Its formal result, deeply rooted in its surrounding landscape, is the materialization of a search for different possibilities within the domestic realm.
