Ziggurhut
House in Yucatán, MX 2023
The Yucatán has been a landing site before. An asteroid hit its Gulf coast and ended the Mesozoic era. Later, the Maya built stepped pyramids inland, a form that arrived independently in cultures across the prehistoric world. One landing was a global calamity, the other a regional ancestry.
Today, two stepped houses casually land in the same place. Identical in shape, yet different in size, Ziggurhut asks us to notice small differences in scale and domesticity across both houses. We notice stairs too big or just right, with doors sized to people while windows are sized to the house. Three equal steps make a single story in one and two stories in the other. These differences are minute, yes, but they bring our attention to the space between two nearly identical houses.
That space is an extended house for an extended family that grew up nearby and dispersed across North America. It's a place to come back to and reconnect. The larger house is a one-bedroom; the smaller is two bedrooms. Inside a walled garden, each bedroom opens onto the center of the life of the house. The family can occupy one part or several, together or apart. The perimeter wall folds out into figures: an outdoor shower and two fireplaces, each aligning with a house or a stair. These figures and the houses land haphazardly, like a city in the middle of the jungle.
The houses are built the way most buildings in rural Yucatán are built: concrete masonry finished with stucco and painted in vibrant color. Stucco and paint dull tectonics in favor of a flat silhouette, rendering the houses as graphic, low resolution, and shapely. We notice their stepped form as much as the differences between doors and windows. It's an architecture of immediacy and comparison, casually landed.
PROGRAM House for Extended Family
SIZE 1,600 sq.ft.
LOCATION San Crisanto, Mexico
REVIEW The Plan Magazine, Domus
TEAM Dutra Brown, Joshua Coronado
CONSTRUCTION + ENGINEERING Constructum
PHOTOGRAPHY Onnis Luque
- Street View
- Both Houses
- Aerial View
- Courtyard View
- Large House
- Small House
- Ground Floor
- Second Floor
- Street View
- The Same Form at Two Sizes
- Pyramid Projection
- Close Up
- Outdoor Shower
- Fireplace Figure, Stout
- Fireplace Figure, Heavy
- Section, Large House
- Section, Small House
- Section, Large House
- Section, Small House
- Model, Large House
- Model, Small House
- Inside Stair
- Living Space