AR House awards 2021 shortlisted: water is captured and allowed to meander around a series of buildings designed by Robert Hutchison Architecture and JSa Arquitectura, before it is reused in the dry Mexican winters
It is difficult to imagine architecture that can contend with the drama of the landscape in Temascaltepec. Situated in a nature reserve, the Rain Harvest Home looks out on to the Nevado de Toluca, an imposing volcano, to the north, offering views across the valley where fog settles during the rainy season here in Mexico. It is only fitting then, that this project defers to this breath-taking landscape. A sustainable and off-grid sanctuary, Rain Harvest Home offers a striking vision of what sustainable architecture in this region can offer; its design is not only practically dependent on its surroundings, but evokes a sense that the complex is in reverence to the nature surrounds it.
Commissioned as a sustainable retreat space, Seattle-based Robert Hutchison Architecture and local practice JSA have created a 4,000 ft2 complex that features a central house, a studio space and bath house. A meandering path connects these buildings around pools of water captured in new reservoirs. This path is a clever infiltration ditch system; across the site water is captured, redirected, filtered and reused. Much of the complex infrastructure (which also features solar panels and an irrigated orchard) that allow the buildings to be self-sufficient has been discretely hidden – or rather, hidden in plain sight, designed to make the Rain Harvest Home feel like a temple to water, rather than a house on the site of a water plant. In an area that is increasingly facing water scarcity due to climate catastrophe, the sustainable infrastructure responding to the area’s wet and rainy summers and extremely dry winters should be applauded – an alternative to the artificial oases commonly seen in luxury resorts and hotels of the region.
‘The sustainable and off-grid sanctuary offers a striking vision of what sustainable architecture in this region can offer’
A clear reference to Louis Kahn and Anne Tyng’s Trenton Bath House, the project plays with Kahn’s idea of buildings as ‘societies of rooms’. Each ‘room’ is connected to the outside, and therefore more easily to one another. All three independent structures are clad with black-stained timber, giving way to sleek interiors of exposed timber and local stone. But it is the bath house that takes centre stage; with cold volcanic stone shining underfoot, the circular atrium punches upwards through its heart, allowing rain to fall directly into the plunge pool at its centre, to be enjoyed after a hot bath or sauna.
The main residence, conceived of as a pavilion, is centred on a raised concrete plinth of which two-thirds is a covered, wrap-around terrace. Large windows allow views through the space, with the bedrooms on the first floor housed in periscope-like structures that flood the rooms below with light. In all three structures – the house, the studio and the bath house – the indoor/outdoor terraces frame the landscape. During the rainy season, these views only become more sublime as the relationship between architecture and landscape intensifies – the elegant minimalism of the interior accentuated by the dynamism of the outdoors.
Photographs by César Béjar, Laia Rius Solá, Robert Hutchison, Jaime Navarro, Benedikt Fahlbusch
Nyima Murry is an alumnus of the New Architecture Writers (NAW), which is a free programme for emerging design writers, developing the journalistic skill, editorial connections and critical voice of its participants. NAW focuses on black and minority ethnic emerging writers who are under-represented across design journalism and curation and is lead by Thomas Aquilina and Tom Wilkinson with the support of the Architecture Foundation and The Architectural Review.
New Architecture Writers is now taking applications for their 2022 cohort. Apply before 7 January to be a part of next year's programme
