Casa Campanario
Project Status: Completed
Project Year: 2022
Use: Residential
Client: Private
Area: 1,280 m2
Location: Queretaro
Design: MCxA
Team: Tridim, Schlaich Bergermann Partners, Luz + Forma, Monserrat Padilla, Saad, AKF, Three.
Context
Casa Campanario is a single-family residence designed for a couple with four children, accommodating the spatial demands of a six-person household requiring multiple bedrooms, shared living areas, and flexible spaces supporting family life across different ages and activities. The house is located within the El Campanario subdivision in Querétaro, a central Mexican city that has experienced substantial growth in recent decades driven by manufacturing industry, particularly automotive production, and an expanding middle and upper-middle class seeking quality residential developments.
The subdivision context typically implies controlled planning, established infrastructure, architectural covenants, and a certain level of urban services and security that characterize gated or planned residential communities within Mexican cities, creating expectations around property values, neighborhood character, and architectural quality.
Design Principles
The defining architectural gesture is a curved facade that responds to the formal intention of creating reminiscence to Alvar Aalto's iconic Savoy vase, one of Finnish modernism's most celebrated design objects. This reference to Aalto's organic modernism connects the house to a design lineage emphasizing human-scaled modernism, natural materials, and flowing forms that contrast with the rigid geometries of doctrinaire international style architecture. The curve is not merely formal play but generates functional and experiential consequences, creating space for wild gardening that deliberately disrupts the regular morphology of the otherwise rational volume.
This juxtaposition of curved and orthogonal geometries establishes productive tension between order and spontaneity, control and nature, rationality and emotion. The wild garden enabled by the facade's curve introduces unpredictability and natural processes into what might otherwise be a purely controlled architectural composition, allowing vegetation to grow freely rather than being manicured into submission. This gesture acknowledges that successful domestic architecture must balance the organizational clarity required for efficient family living with moments of delight, surprise, and connection to natural processes that prevent homes from becoming merely functional machines for living. The formal reference to Aalto's vase elevates the curve beyond arbitrary gesture to culturally meaningful citation, connecting a house in Querétaro to broader modernist traditions while adapting those influences to Mexican context and contemporary family life.