The AI Tower is a vertical housing project developed by HW-STUDIO. It is located on a 10 x 25-meter plot in the Chapultepec neighborhood in the city of Morelia, the most important city in the state of Michoacán from a social, political, economic, cultural, and educational view.

The required program consists of a basement that would be used as a garage, a first level which would be used as a personal museum for the owner's collection of classic cars. In the four subsequent levels, two apartments with two bedrooms and two with a single bedroom. Finally, there is a garden terrace on the roof.
In the HW-STUDIO project, the orientation towards the west suggested a façade that filtered the incidence of the sun at dawn, hiding the glass facades and completing the architectural piece. The result obtained illuminates and ventilates the interior space from the facade, but never allows a view from inside to outside or vice versa.

The AI tower in its nature, white and modern, aims to be a space that evokes silence, a pause, in the noisy and sometimes violent symphony of forms of any city.
 

 Description of project by HW-STUDIO

Torre Ai is in a very interesting neighborhood in Morelia named Chapultepec. The first few cases of modern architecture in the city were found there. 

In the 1960's the upper-class people settled in this neighborhood and began to adopt new ideas coming from Mexico City. There was an enormous pleasure and euphoria for the kind of architecture that Luis Barragan, Mario Pani and Juan O'Gorman, among others were developing.

Walking around Chapultepec, one can feel and notice the modernist vein of the neighborhood. Although it is already declining due to the enormous rate of crime and violence, some cases of housing still preserving the modern architectural principles stand out.

It became clear to us that the small tower had to uphold some of those modern architectural principles that make this neighborhood so special.

The program is organized as follows: the first story works as an underground parking lot; the second story is the owner’s classic car garage; starting from the third story, the program is divided in two sections: a ware-house standing at the back of the property and one and two-bedroom apartments at the front. 

As the space for housing was limited, we placed all the horizontal and vertical circulations and services on the right, thus freeing up the center of the floor and making the most of the available space. The public areas are kept completely open, while the private ones are easily separated by a wall. 

The orientation of the facade towards the east generated sunshine issues in the morning. For that reason, and because of the lack of nice views towards the street, we proposed an aluminum shutter that allowed a dimmed light through in the morning and diffused the views from the inside to the outside and back. 

I must confess that I also fancied the idea of seeing silhouettes from the outside as if performing in a play.

The building's largest and most outspoken windows face south. The purpose, besides having a convenient orientation, is to be able to see the long mountain of Santa Maria running from east to west, which is an important focal point in the city. 

These windows open completely to allow the fresh air coming down from that very mountain, connecting the user to it in many different ways.

The height of the adjoining wall is high enough to hide the roofs from the neighbors but low enough for the mountain to lay on.

AI tower, white and modern in nature, aims to be a space that evokes silence, a pause among the noisy and sometimes violent symphony of forms within any city.

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Architects
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Design team
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Sergio Antonio García Padilla, Jesús López, Ander Sánchez, Paula Macouzet.
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Collaborators
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Leads Architects.- Rogelio Vallejo Bores and Óscar Didier Ascencio Castro.
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Budget
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650,000.00 usd.
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Dates
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Completion Year.- July 2020.
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Location
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Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico.
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Photography
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HW-Studio is an architecture practice formed by Rogelio Vallejo Bores, Oscar Didier Asencio Castrocreado, Vera Sánchez Macouzet, Tirso Figueroa, Sergio A. Garcia Padilla and Jesús Alejandro López Hernández, founded in 2010 in Morelia city, Mexico, within the booming of violence of the country. 

The Studio was created with the purpose to stimulate and get implicated in the architectural process with artistic principles and eastern (budist) philosophy with western concepts, in order to create spaces that reminds and promotes that threatened peace.

Meditation is part of their creative process, becoming the natural and obvious answer for the creation of spaces that can transmit a serenity sensation, tranquility and silence, in a world mostly noisy and violent.

They constantly seek to promote an appreciation of what is really important in life, eliminating from architecture, everything that is not essential, so that through conscious contemplation, states of inner peace are reached.

The name: HW-Studio, comes from the union of the H letter, which in spanish is considered the silent letter and it means the representation of silence. The W letter comes from the Japanese concept wabisabi, which has no Spanish translation or direct equivalence with western concepts, but it could be understood as beauty of the impermanent and the imperfect.
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