PEV
Facing El Retiro
A difficult yet beautiful intervention.
That’s what it means to design an architectural project for one of those rare, lifelong friends you can count on one hand. It could be a challenge, but instead, let’s celebrate the unique virtue of childhood friendships: no half-truths, no sugarcoated opinions. Just honesty.
This is a home just 10 meters from El Retiro Park—separated from mine by nothing more than a thin wall between our living rooms.
In this project, there’s El Retiro, childhood games, the opening and closing of the doors of fate. A home that feels like play, with multiple configurations and shifting uses. A living room that expands, contracts, or opens depending on the moment. Spaces to sleep, to linger, to work, to play. Add-ons like dressing rooms or rooms filled with books, films, or vinyl records—all of it within one room, or two, or three... or why not four?
There’s a secret wall and two alabaster bars, like the ones in Los Gatos, La Dolores, Casa Alberto, or La Trocha. Exposed concrete pillars—because between friends, there are no secrets. A floor of wood and broken red mosaic tiles, intersecting with concrete and basalt paving, like petals or cherry and apricot pits—disrupting the rational and the sterile functionality of correctness that never applies to childhood. There are also moving walls made of translucent paper, bringing light and imagination into the rooms—like Plato’s cave, a quiet nod to the beauty of simplicity: laughter, beautiful girls, good cinema, and old music.
This house is all of that—and more.
And somehow, it all fits inside a pencil case: both future and memory.
