Project description by Young & Ayata + Michan Architecture
This project is for a mid-market residential building in Mexico City, consisting of seven 1-2 bedroom apartments with parking in the basement. It was decided early on that the construction system would be cast-place-concrete, that the unit types would be simple and straightforward, and that the building would maximize its site footprint and allowed height. These were constraints that satisfied the client’s desires and simultaneously allowed us to focus our efforts on an interesting opportunity in the project, the apertures.
The site strategy drove the two side elevations toward the lot lines, making more standard windows undesirable. In order to allow light, view, and ventilation to all sides of the building, a scheme was developed to manipulate the windows into something familiar yet subtly strange.
The rectangular windows are rotated into the building’s facade, resulting in two ruled surfaces at the top and bottom and transforming the window into an inverted trapezoidal bay. As the windows rotate in, the slabs appear to pull at the head and sill. This results in a facade that is both extremely blunt in its flatness and is also a dynamic bas-relief of smooth undulating shadows. These windows also produced different interior moments as the shifting facade met the standardized unit layout. Views out from the interior became small events of forced oblique perspective as one looked both out and down the street at the same time making each unit unique as it approached the enclosure.
DL1310 by Young & Ayata + Michan Architecture. Photograph by Rafael Gamo.
The design process for the apertures was guided by both iterative digital models and research into the history of cast concrete ruled surfaces in the architecture of Latin America. A number of full-scale mock-ups allowed us to find a tectonic articulation that used board-formed concrete as an integral expression of the aperture concept. The final methodology used traditional construction techniques combined with reusable fiberglass casting modules to produce an alternative expression between digital technology and traditions of construction.
Young & Ayata formed a partnership in New York in 2008 to explore the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities of architecture and urbanism. The practice is dedicated to both built commissions and experimental research. The practice views the reality of contemporary building as a provocation for architectural form, material and technology. In following these trajectories it is necessary to understand architecture in its historical processes. Michael Young and Kutan Ayata, both principals teach and view the educational experience as crucial to the continual development of architectural ideas.
Young & Ayata is one of two first prize winners in the International Competition for the New Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany. Recently, they were finalists in the 2015 MoMA YAP Program in Istanbul, Turkey. In 2014, the partners were the recipients of the Young Architects Prize from Architectural League of New York, their entry in the open international competition for the Dalseong Citizen's Gymnasium in South Korea received an honorable mention, and their submission for the Pamphlet Architecture 35 publication was also given an honorable mention. A manifesto titled "The Estranged Object: Realism in Art and Architecture", written by Michael Young with the projects of Young & Ayata was published in the Spring of 2015 by the Graham Foundation; an exhibition with the firm's work in relation to this publication was on display at the Graham Foundation in Chicago. In 2015, the Firm's work was also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art-New York, the Istanbul Modern and Princeton University.
