Cool House - Mexico's Habita Hotel - Ten Arquitectos - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, August, 2001

Elegant conversion of an apartment building in Mexico makes it a poetic addition to the cityscape.

The Habita Hotel, designed by Enrique Norten and Bernardo Gomez-Pimienta from Ten Arquitectos, is a luminous glass box on Colonia Polanco, Mexico City. Though the crystalline structure looks new, it is not, but was created out of a five-storey 1950s apartment building. The street is a busy one, lined with high-rise stores and offices, and the architects were at pains to create a distinctive identity for the building. This they did by wrapping the building in a skin of frosted glass panels, which floats a few metres away from the old structure. Two new decks floating above its roof, and similarly wrapped, provide swimming pool, gym, bar/cafe and roof terrace.

Sandwiched between old and new facades on south and east is an interstitial space incorporating the original balconies and new stretches of corridor. As well as putting physical space between the rooms and the exterior of the building, it acts as a climatic and acoustic buffer, regulating heat and shielding the interior from its hectic surroundings. Transparent slots, apparently placed at random, puncture the opacity of the outer skin but the glimpses they frame of the world outside are carefully chosen. Each of the hotel's 36 rooms is filled with light diffused through two planes of glass - the outer one preserving privacy is translucent, the inner one transparent. Internally, design of the hotel is as restrainedly elegant as its exterior, with use of very few, carefully chosen materials. Rooms are furnished with an austere bed and a cantilevered plane of glass serving as desk and table. Everything else is concealed behind a polished panelled wall.

From a distance, the building appears to be a mute diaphanous box. But closer, you see the shadows of balconies, walkways, of people moving. At night the building becomes a lantern with changing patterns of luminance as lights are switched on and off.