Peruvian Edge: This colourful seaside house offers intense and sometimes unexpected relationships between artefact and nature - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2001

The climate of Peru's coast is often abominable. Between the ocean and the Andes is a long thin strip of dusty, dun coloured desert, almost at sea level. In most of it there has been no rain for three decades. For a good deal of the year, the sky is overcast, and though Peru is in the tropics, it is certainly not very hot.

Yet the coast has its attractions: amazing marine life and, when the sun actually comes out, beaches that would be envied in the Mediterranean. This house is some 120km from Lima's sprawl, and has been designed to cope with the strange circumstances. In the nineteenth century, a fascinating form of house plan was evolved in the coastal suburbs of the capital: plans were often U-shaped, with a central court opening on to sea or street through a protective iron grille. There is a dissolution of differences between interior and exterior space, yet a clear distinction between private and public.

Casa M draws on this typology, abstracts it, and sets it on a steeper site than the original versions. So you enter from the uphill side, and walk down to the main floor where there is a sort of grand loggia which frames westerly views of the sea and one of the strange seal-inhabited islands that stud the country's coastline. Construction is of reinforced concrete and is carefully detailed to avoid the main problem of the area, which is of course not damp but dust. Red and sand colours were chosen to minimize the drabness of settled dust (white buildings quickly look dirty in this part of the world). But the colours also set up a procession of planes revealing the spatial nature of the composition, which, the architects argue, 'is a plain rectangular volume excavated by narrow open spaces conceived as cracks in hardened sand' like the raddled cliffs of ancient alluvium that form the seaside. But it is infinitely more elegant than the natural structures that have apparently inspired it.