Text by the architect:

Located in the central highlands of Guatemala we find the UNESCO world heritage city of Antigua Guatemala, nestled between breathtaking views of volcanos and raw natural beauty. The city famed for its historical Spanish colonial architecture, agricultural lands and local craftsmanship.
Antigua is a city where the established conventional style of architecture and regulations in the area remain mostly unchallenged, we are currently witnessing the city’s uncontrolled sprawling into the mountains as a consequence. The outdated and inflexible way of building is compromising the natural surroundings the region is so renowned for.

Casa Q’anil proposes a way of building that merges with the surrounding landscape and relates to the topography and geological masses of volcanos and mountains surrounding the valley. A monolith covered with earth and surrounded by water, sculpted to allow a void to filter natural light within the central space. A courtyard is born, a place of adaptation and cyclical temporality where produce of cultural significance are laid out depending on seasonal availability of local harvest (coffee, beans, corn, etc).

Every room in the house was designed to be flexible in its nature. The house has the ability to open and close with three layers of sliding doors to allow the occupant to choose the desired level of interaction with its surrounding landscape. These movable curved elements of glass, lattice and solid allow a highly desirable flexibility for dwelling within a minimum required space.

The main fabric of the house comes from the very soil that was extracted in the process of hollowing out the space upon which the building now stands. Fifty-four- thousand curved bricks were produced on site and manually placed layer upon layer, an utmost refinement of what is principally primitive. Not so much a building as an earthwork, the design is about digging and layering up, it is animal architecture, archaic, adaptable and primary. An offering back to nature for what we have taken.