The small 4-unit apartment building is located in Barranco, an old summer resort beside the Pacific Ocean, now a designated historic district of Lima and a protected landmark neighborhood.
The project leverages the complexity and contradictions of the town’s preservation guidelines —such as a 12-meter height limit, street alignment, vertical fenestrations, and a 30% non-built area requirement on a small plot-. A new building type is proposed based on these challenges. The new type preserves the space of the traditional street. Still, it generates a transversal transparency, a porosity of the urban space that goes beyond creating a buffer between public and private.
The commission comes from the aspirations of four friends to live together in the historic center. They decided to call an architect and directly build it using the method of self-construction. Thus, the project could evolve over time (in fact, it began as a place of collective transdisciplinary creation), and could adapt to the requirements of these four people. Self-building escapes the laws of profitability and economic efficiency but not the economy of means, so the creation of living spaces was privileged over the speed of its construction.