Children’s Room is a small annex to a modern house in the south of Mexico City. Conceived as a contrast to the main building with a modular structure, parallel floors and ceilings – FR-EE’s design for the extension creates an ideal environment for the family’s children to stimulate their senses, activity levels and help shape their developing identities away from the hustle and bustle of the world outside.
Hovering above the ground, stark white against the surrounding greenery, the Children’s Room appears like a bubble from the future frozen in time and space. The exterior is a continuous surface which wraps around itself and turns into a ramp allowing the children to move intuitively inside the building and out to the surrounding garden.
The interior is as organic as the exterior, flowing and curving as the shell suggest from the outside to provide a sense of comfort, security and enclosure. Furniture and fixtures conform naturally to the ebbs and flows of the building’s shape, to avoid right angles completely and give way to a continuous soft interior that allows the children to experiment with the gravity of objects and their own bodies.
The construction is designed in three dimensions, with a skeleton of steel lined with poured cement. The result of this is a seamless skin that rests on only one point in the garden and connects to the parents’ bedroom.
PROJECT DATA
CLIENT: Private
LOCATION: Mexico City, Mexico
PROGRAM: Housing & Habitat
STATUS: Built
DATE: 2000-01
SIZE: 135 m2
FR-EE TEAM: Fernando Romero, Victor Jaime, Mark Seligson, Martin Palardy, Aaaron Hernández, Gerardo Brossin, Mauricio Correa, Jorge Hernández de Garza, Juan Pablo Maza, Tatiana Bilbao, Vianey Botello