Marine curves: using the traditional materials of the surrounding neo-vernacular seaside resort, this holiday house explores memories of the German organic and geological time - Ar House

Architectural Review, The, July, 2003 by Crispin Hews

Ixtapa is in the state of Guerrero, some 250km up the coast from Acapulco, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Its traditional name means 'the white sand place', and its climate ranges from humid, with heavy tropical rains on summer nights, when temperatures can reach 32C, to relatively dry in winter, when the average temperature is 26C. Almost every day of the year enjoys cloudless sunshine during daylight hours.

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The resort, which has grown up over the past 30 years, has been planned with some care to take advantage of the idyllic climate. It has strong urban design (or at least appearance) rules, which include insistence on using natural materials and palapa (tropical thatch), * or at least tejado (tiled) roofs. The clients for Fernando Romero's house wanted a place for family reunions, where everyone could enjoy the amazing site and sun.

Romero's basic strategy was to make the ground floor into the general or public area, while the upper one is devoted to bedrooms for visiting family members. The tour de force is the very large living room that looks out over the evergreen garden, beach pool and sea through a huge, unglazed opening, made possible by the climate. The curving plan creates a diagram that seems to have the pattern of a rather complicated cell seen under a microscope. The great room opens to the south under a covered terrace. To the north are the more utilitarian service rooms and the master bedroom, the latter positioned so that the place can become a flat when no visitors are staying. In three dimensions, the space resembles a cave, gradually carved out from a massive boulder by the action of the sea.

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As the resort's rules demand, walls are sculpted out of white rendered masonry, and there is a shallow thatched roof. The big span of the public area and the long cantilevers are, of course, generated by using an inner concrete structure that is masked by the flowing white masonry. The place is an evocative echo of the Einstein- Turm school of organic architecture strangely translated to the tropics.

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Architect

LCM/Fernando Romero

Job architect: Alfonso Salem

Design team: Fernando Romero, Juan Pablo Maza, Mark Seligson, Tatiana Bilbao, Ernesto Gadea, Jacinta Garatachia, Mauricio Rodriguez, Victor Jaime, Aaron Hernandez

Structural engineer

Fernando Carrillo

HOUSE, GUERRERO, MEXICO

ARCHITECT

LCM/FERNANDO ROMERO

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* Traditionally, a palapa is an open-sided dwelling with a thatched roof made of dried palm leaves: or any structure that is open-sided and thatched with palm leaves.