Calx Sustainable Houses / Pezestudio

Text description provided by the architects. This project starts with an assignment by four people, two couples, a filmmaker, a psychotherapist, an anthropologist, and a dancer, who regularly go to Los Pulpos spa, located 40km south of Lima. They want to enjoy their days together on the beach. The result of the project is two houses that touch each other with simplicity and elegance, a dialogue between local materials and the landscape, between the transparencies and the views of the sea. A vertical journey through the different levels until reaching the roof where you can watch the sunset while swimming in the pool. Casas Calx project is located in front of the Pachacámac Islands, the habitat of numerous species of seabirds, known for their biological diversity in the marine-coastal ecosystems. This spectacular location, together with the topography, inspires the distribution of the houses, which are designed in two blocks around a central patio where different plant species live, and which allows all the rooms to have natural lighting and ventilation.

The two houses follow a compositional symmetry in the design, sharing the logic of the distribution on three levels, all of them with sound and spatial independence. The rooms are diaphanous and open, allowing flexibility of uses and promoting the daily use of outdoor spaces as an extension of them. They communicate through the patio on the lower level and with wooden walkways on the upper levels. The main materials are lime, bamboo, and wood, low-impact materials with resistance to the climate and local seismic movements. To optimize and speed up the construction, the use of lime blocks is selected, reinforced for the structural elements, and a simple system for the partition elements. Located on sandy terrain with a pronounced slope, the use of concrete has been minimized, limiting its use to the structure in contact with the ground.

Lime as an environmentally friendly building material has many advantages, one of which is its long service life. Its manufacturing process is not polluting, as being so abundant in nature it avoids transportation. As properties stand out their ability to regulate humidity, and their extraordinary insulating capacity, both thermal and acoustic, produce a lower energy demand that translates into economic savings for the inhabitants and fewer toxic emissions to the atmosphere. Casas Calx is a project that supports contemporary design through material culture and sustainability in production and construction techniques in a unique environment.