La Fábrica

Oaxaca, Mexico

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La Fábrica

Oaxaca, Mexico

Firm

Philipppe

Type

Landscape + Planning › Private Garden

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2018

SIZE

10,000 sqft - 25,000 sqft

BUDGET

$50K - 100K

La Fábrica garden is Oaxaca’s first open space suited to both social gatherings and garden wanderers. The project proposes to revive a disused property through dialogue between vestiges, landscapes and specific architectural interventions; which together comprise an outdoor program.

At street level, restored mud-brick walls — composed of stone, tiles, adobe and lime — surround a semi-arid climate garden and a pink limestone multi-use esplanade. Levitating seven meters high above, a rusted metal frame supports the corresponding systems for roofing, lighting and sound.

Through a designed interplay, both front and back structures have white clay tiles as floors and white clay vaults, as well as steel hanging ladders that lead up to their respective terraces.

Two majestic pre-existing trees — Jacaranda and Pepper tree — frame the garden’s stone-walled reception. Receding to the back structure, native Huaje trees give way to a shaded enclave wrapped around by adobe walls and discrete metal columns.

In the middle, sprout a yellow Guayacan tree and a red-brick artistic mural; alongside, a set of stairs continue downward towards its underground stratum.

Light filters through the Guayacan tree and illuminates the underground textures of lime, concrete, wood and volcanic stone. Below the limestone esplanade, vaults of coloured concrete and lime paint walls contain the underground gallery. The concrete vaults help unify the underground operational spaces: private rooms, offices, machine rooms, bathrooms and a kitchen.

Our arrangement and reiterations of native elements — clay, stone, and vegetation — respond to the overlapping of past/present so tangible in today’s Oaxaca. In so doing, our governing intention was to provide a lens for viewing these accretions more clearly within an operational social space.

Hence, for instance, the living symbol of the Guayacan tree — that reaches from below upward, from dark to light — and its centrality of this gesture to our design approach.

Credits:
- Photography - Camila Cossio
- LM - interiorismo - Interior Design
- Arquitectos Artesanos - Restoration and Mural
- Grupo Cocoa - Construction