Best of 2020: The Hourglass Corral

The distinctive housing development, titled “Voronoi’s Corrals”, benchmarks from the local corral typology, processed with contemporary computation. The design employs Voronoi grids, which are organic and more easily adaptable to data. The house faces south; exposed concrete beams project beyond the facades, shaping Voronoi cells and supporting shading devices. Each cell is covered with soil, planted with a different herb species. Earth provides adequate heat insulation to the interiors, and the colors of the plants highlight the strategy at large. In the interior, the roof is formulated in successive funnels topped with a round skylight for natural ventilation. The idea of the “hourglass”, lending the house its name, informed the design of an architecture that is achieved with contemporary computational means and geometries, aiming to develop the landscape in a similarly natural way as the one that led, perhaps, the corral builders into their peculiar -yet absolutely goal-oriented and place-specific- choices.

DECA architecture