Pink architecture: La Muralla Roja and Sonora House
Photos: beastydesign/unsplash.com
This article appeared in colore #bonbonrosa
Order the printed version at: kontakt@brillux.de
These two projects were created almost 50 years apart. La Muralla Roja was a revolutionary apartment complex in its time. Its architect played a key role in inspiring the designers of the desert residence Sonora House.
La Muralla Roja – 1973
That whole era was dreamlike. (…) And to me, La Muralla Roja seems to act as a small monument to its time.
Ricardo Bofill
The "La Muralla Roja" apartment complex, by Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, was built on the Costa Blanca at the beginning of the early 1970s. After engaging with the then-prohibited PSUC communist party, Bofill, born in 1939, had to continue his architecture studies in Switzerland. After completing his degree, he returned to Spain and began to design apartment complexes that were composed of individual modules, and ignored the simple forms favored internationally.
When asked about this, Bofill comments: "With our projects, we wanted to break up the Corbusian Block and develop a new type of city. Our buildings were supposed to turn their backs on the conventional street style. Inside, we wanted to encourage residents to embrace a new way of cohabiting, prompting social issues, overcoming isolated small family structures. We were young then. We wanted utopia." Tucked behind Maghreb-style fortress architecture, along with its 50 apartments, La Muralla Roja offers a protected area, a labyrinth of stairs, cantilevers and patios, with space for novelty to unfold.
Sonora House – 2019
Unfortunately, the project was suspended at some point, but we were so excited by the idea of our concept that we finished it anyway.
Davit and Mary Jilavyan
Moscow-based architect Davit Jilavyan and his sister, illustrator and visualizer Mary Jilavyan, created a special home for a Mexican client who wanted a family home that was to be built in the Sonora Desert. "We wanted to combine color and form harmoniously – in a way that was adapted to the setting," they explain. Experimenting with color and shape led to the design of a pastel-colored house with a modern silhouette.
The client commissioned the design of a family residence with minimal geometry, but wanted it to feature bold exteriors and a strong style. Davit and Mary Jilavyan decided to dispense with standard hole windows and introduce the windows as elements of irregularity with different shapes and dimensions. The design, with sculptural sloping roofs, special window structures and the interplay of pink and yellow tones is a modern interpretation of the colorful, minimalist geometries of classical-modernist Mexican architecture. Once again, something new has emerged, yet with connections to the tried and tested – pink is once again the color of utopia.
