Excerpt: Bergantin, a residence by Zamna Arquitectura, explores privacy and light in a dense urban context through an open floor layout and sculptural use of skylights. A central courtyard seamlessly connects all the spaces, while careful material choices, like pigmented concrete and local stone, blend the home into its desert surroundings. The design offers a thoughtful, serene retreat with a strong spatial and sensory identity.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] The project is located in the city of San José del Cabo, California Baja Sur on BERGANTIN street, immersed in the urban environment. Surrounded by three adjacent buildings that leave the facade facing the street free, the project takes into account the limited context in terms of views to the outside.
The proposed open floors plan is designed for daytime areas, allowing the perimeter walls to open up to the courtyard surrounding the house, allowing light and cross-ventilation. Toward the rear, a corridor protected by a wall with a series of skylights and concrete beams provides access to the only room on the ground floor and introduces a vertical interconnection element.
On the upper floor, the rooms are arranged like a tetris game, and their interiors are protected by clay lattices. These, in turn, provide natural light and allow the street to shine through from the interior. The layout of the upper floor volumes allows for a playful use of skylights that highlight sculptural elements of the interior, such as the connecting staircases and a sculptural space that makes its presence felt in the transitions from the mezzanine to the ground floor.
In terms of materials, the use of exposed concrete, which will include a pigment, will provide a character that distances itself from the urban context of the área, alluding to the tones of the Baja desert. These earth tones allow the site’s identity to negatively not impact the site visually, but quite the opposite. Raw steel will protect the garage, street access and service door.
On the perimeter walls of its fences, the use of local flagstone will provide soft light through indirect irradiation towards the interior and tactile sensations to the eye through its textures and shadows. Three volumes hang like lanterns at dusk, providing their unique visual impact.
On the ground floor, natural lighting is provided primarily by skylights and indirect light from the stone perimeter walls that radiate through the openings into the courtyard surrounding the project. On the upper floor, light enters through slab openings (skylights), which in turn overlook the living área. The bedrooms have balconies that act as patios, protected by the clay latticework that lines their facades. As studies of sunlight in the area indicate, during the winter, light enters horizontally and during the summer it does so more upwards.
The project seeks to generate sensations that perceive its urban environment from within, yet at the same time create a sense of detachment from it, leaning more toward privacy and protection from its surrounding neighbors. Along its paths, a series of skylights and beams generate luminous effects in the transitions and allow light to enter the interior, which attests to the passage of time as the sunlight passes. Day, evening and night are present in a timely manner, creating contrasts and highlighting the diverse tones and textures of its materiality. Through the study of sunlight, the project also advocates for the consciousness activated in the viewer’s phenomenological experience, highlighting its haptic qualities.
The ground floor features an open plan layout. Perimeter openings in the walls bring natural light into the interior, and skylights highlight sculptural elements. To provide privacy to the private areas on the upper floor, without compromising the street’s presence, we protected the exterior and its views with a latticework made of clay elements. These open from the interior like a magnifying glass, allowing the possibility of expanding the sensation of views to the outside through the lattice work individually, like an eye responding to a peephole in a door. The opposite occurs from the street. At night, thanks to the interior lighting, the volumes become street lanterns, creating a very distinctive play of light and creating a landmark in the area.
The rooftop is accessed from the exterior, exiting through an opening from the upper floor containing the bedrooms, above the same stairwell. This arrangement preserves the scale of the volumes without increasing the height of the parapets, allowing for expansive views from the terrace and contributing to interesting transitions that play with the dialogue between the interior and exterior.
Drawings
Images
