Those who like Hayao Miyazaki’s animation must remember the cave where My Neighbor Totoro lives, passing through winding passages, and the space hidden underground is full of vegetation, green, and butterflies and sunshine. Such dream residences really exist in the real world. An architect from Mexico has designed many organic buildings composed of mushrooms, sharks, shells and even snakes. They mimic the nature of sand dunes, hills, caves, etc. with smooth and soft lines. The shape blends into the environment and is full of fairy tales.
The Mexican architect advocated the concept of “organic architecture and green house”, introducing sunlight and breeze into the house, allowing the human habitat to blend into nature without a trace, and blending with the surrounding background. This architectural form imitates the surrounding landscape. Promotes the development of sustainable architecture in Mexico.
Original “cave house” blended with nature
On the plain grassy slope, from another angle, there is a door leading to the inside. Walking into the interior of the house is even more unique. Each space is round and spherical, connected by narrow passages, like a primitive cave.
The first entrance is the living room. The greenery outside the irregular floor-to-ceiling windows is unobstructed; the long sofa draws a graceful arc along the wall; the log coffee table and the metal chair collide with the simplicity and modernity; the bar counter “flying down” from the ceiling is used to divide the living room Like the dining room; the operating table of the dining room is long like the sofa, and a hole in the wall is the cabinet.
The seemingly eclectic space is not inferior to practicality. Passing through the narrow passage, the view suddenly became clear again, with a bedroom and a study room inside. On the left hand side is the brown leather sofa and bed, following the direction of the skylight, which looks like a river flowing into the ocean. On the right hand side is a full wall of bookshelves. When the weather is good, sitting by the floor-to-ceiling window and reading a book, is there anything more pleasant than this?
In the bathroom, the bathtub is embedded in the floor, covered with mosaic tiles, and there is a skylight with excellent lighting. You can also enjoy the open-air swimming pool at home. Opposite the bathroom is a cloakroom, with large and small holes for storing clothes, shoes, and bags. The walls retain the rough texture, and the furniture is mostly wooden, so minimal that there is no trace of redundancy, which coincides with the popular Wabi-sabi style (simple, natural, rough) in recent years. More importantly, the whole house has almost no edges and corners, and it is all composed of rounded arcs, giving people a soft sense of security.
Nature is the source of inspiration for organic architectural design. The original idea of the project came from a peanut shell: two bright and spacious oval spaces combined with a low and narrow dim space. The architect designed according to the basic functional needs of people’s lives, a co-living space, including living room, dining room and kitchen, and a bedroom with cloakroom and bathroom.
Ocean Satellite Complex
Similar “cave houses” have become more and more popular in recent years and are commonly found in guest houses, hotels, art galleries, exhibition halls, etc. On the one hand, the arc-shaped house itself has a great sense of design; on the other hand, it combines with plants, sunlight and running water to realize people’s desire to be close to nature.
Interestingly speaking, we used to be primitive people who drank blood and lived in caves. After hundreds of millions of years of evolution, we lived in modern high-rise buildings. Now we seem to have returned to the original starting point and fell in love with the “cave house” again.
There are many similar peculiar designs by this architect, such as the marine satellite complex with more fairy-tale colors, the residences are transformed into marine creatures lurking in the grass, and their big eyes are spinning around. To enter the door, you must get into the mouth of the big fish. The room is “overgrown with weeds”, like a spaceship carrying earth plants. In his works, no matter the exterior facade, interior space, landscape and even furniture design, one can see a temperament blended with nature.
Break the routine practical design
The architect has spent nearly 30 years designing these unique buildings for humans, and is committed to creating homes that mimic natural forms. Curved, convex, concave, elliptical and spiral spaces are his design features. In addition to ecological sustainability, these houses are full of vitality and crazy imagination.
You may think that this kind of residential design is not practical. In fact, the opposite is true. The architect has already understood everything. Because it is hidden in the grass slope, the grass and trees outside the building form a natural barrier to protect the interior rooms from wind, snow, dry and humid air, and at the same time avoid cracks and humidity caused by expansion and contraction.
Perhaps everyone thinks that such semi-buried houses are opaque, but in fact they are brighter and more sunny than traditional houses. The windows can face any direction, including skylights. Light enters from above. At the same time, the principle of aerodynamics is used to allow air to circulate freely, forming good ventilation, and truly blending with nature.
Of course, not everyone can own such houses, and their construction is very difficult. In the construction process, a plastic material was used, just like the plasticine in the game model, and the cement composite mortar reinforced mesh structure was adopted to meet the requirements of plasticity. This structure is assembled on a template similar to a skateboard track to form a shell with a metal skeleton, arranged in the form of a ring, and changing the height according to different spaces, and finally forming a spiral winding form. At the end of the frame, two woven ropes are fixed, then cement mortar is poured to form a shell, and then a polyurethane layer is sprayed on the shell to play the role of insulation and waterproofing.
”Before we were born, we floated in our mother’s womb, like astronauts floating in space, but later, we were put into a crib, a room, and a person’s life is like moving from one’box’ to another. A “box” process. This kind of boxy life eliminates people’s freedom and creativity. My design philosophy is to break this rule.” The architect himself said.
”For a long time in the cage, we will return to nature.” As the architect said, from the womb to the crib, from the cave to the high-rise building, the meaning of human habitation has been changing. The only constant is that we want to get close to nature. heart.
