Architects: Felipe Gonzalez-Pacheco (MGP Arquitectura y Urbanismo)
Location: Bogota, Colombia
Collaborators: Alvaro Bohorquez, Camilo Correa, Gabriel Campusano, M. Juliana Sorzano
Client: Laura Gonzalez-Pacheco y Felipe Gonzalez Pacheco
Contractor: Tierra S.A.
Project Area: 1,136 sqm
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: Andrés Valbuena, Jorge Gamboa, Rodrigo Dávila, MGP Arquitectura y Urbanismo

The Project is the result of the dream of two families. The architect´s family and his sister´s family. Each one composed by four members, father, mother and two small child. The houses were designed for the families to grow independently or together. For the cousins to meet at the patio, for the families to get the indispensable intimacy of a house and at the same time share the space and time with the others.

The site, a pair of lots at a corner in the neighborhood Santana, at the start of the mountains at the north east in Bogotá, a bit higher than the beautiful Sabana, with wonderful views all around.

There the architect designed two family houses very much alike. A pair of twin houses in a very special place of a city with a privileged climate, dry, sunny and always around 15 grades, where the light changes the color of vegetation every hour.

Two concrete containers, each one bent in to an L shape depend on each other to live individually. Each house complements its neighbor to configure the central patio and to have intimacy at the same time.

The shape of plain containers made out of ocre concrete are the shell of the houses that open or close the space to configure the relations with the outside. The concrete walls bend and fold to show the plasticity of the material and to let the light play. Apparent wood to the outside makes the contrast. On the second floor a last bent container makes the space for the owner’s studio, isolated from the rest.

The house lives inside from the outside. The concrete containers make the patios in a sequence descending on the terrain, the inside and the outside fuse and have the same spatial value.

The concrete shell contains all dry wall or wood walls and the houses are like a piece of luggage, hard on the outside and soft in the inside to let the changes in the family transform the space inside.