Against all odds, a boutique, modern Mexico City housing complex has been born out of the transformation of a 19th-century home into four apartments by architecture studio Pedro y Juana. The new design successfully negotiated community demands and its complex inner city context, balancing heritage preservation with the city’s need for new housing and densification. Yet it was also uncompromising in terms of local architects Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo and Mecky Reuss’ vision for a generous, liveable and locally authentic architecture.
Mexico city housing T42 by Pedro y Juana
The pair discovered the once-abandoned house for sale on a walk through their own neighbourhood of La Colonia Juarez, an increasingly gentrified community of car mechanics and digital nomads. After recruiting investors, they bought the property and took on the ambitious role as novice developers and dynamic architects of its new future, keen to better understand the political dynamics of their locale. It’s safe to say they became initiated – collaborating over eight years with indigenous activists hosting organised squatters to their left, a newly protected heritage house to the right, as well as city bureaucracy.
Beyond and above its façade, the house opens up into a totally contemporary five-storey apartment building set around a traditional courtyard plan. Large square windows bring dual-aspect light and ventilation into every apartment. Each one also has a unique outdoor space, contributing to urban wellbeing.
'The city should have a memory, but there is also a future of architecture and creativity in Mexico City and that is a conversation that needs to be had – the city can’t be frozen in time,' says Galindo.
Suggesting a direction to this creative vision, the architects took an experimental approach to Mexican craft using cheap, readily available local materials. A volcanic rock aggregate clads the rear exterior, giving it a velvety, brutalist nature inspired partly by Mexico City’s Tamayo Museum. Custom teardrop-shaped clay tiles and traditional rectangular bricks clad the new volumes and terraces, while green-glazed Talavera tiles and exquisite board-marked concrete window ledges bring texture and depth to the minimal open-plan interiors.
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