Apartment CUPA / Mariel Lozano + José Esparza

Apartment CUPA / Mariel Lozano + José Esparza

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Text description provided by the architects. The CUPA-422(a) project is located on the top floor of building “A” of the Centro Urbano Presidente Alemán (CUPA). With only 60 m2, this apartment is one of 1,080 homes that conform to the emblematic group of modern buildings known as the first multi-family in Mexico, a vertical housing project with multiple amenities and significant extensions of green spaces completed in 1949. Designed by architect Mario Pani, CUPA incorporates a mixed-use model with retail on the ground floor and housing on the upper floors. In addition to the compactness and stacking of housing, the multi-family innovates with its duplex typologies, similar to those of the Housing Unit (1952) designed by the architect Le Corbusier. This typology is characterized by the development of the habitat on two levels, favoring the standardization of spaces and the introduction of household appliances, which reflects the social, constructive and technological changes of its time.

The main idea of ​​this renovation project was to preserve the modern essence of the apartment, seeking to recover its original finishes and incorporating similar materials into its design. In this sense, we have recovered the wood of the access door, the staircase and the ironwork of all the windows of the original design.

The apartment is located on two levels, on the access level there is the kitchen and the dining room, and on the upper level the living room, the master bedroom and the bathroom. We started the project by removing the plaster on the beams and slab to show the texture of the formwork in the concrete, and with the lighting project we leave both finishes visible. On the ground floor, a white terrazzo was laid with aggregates in light terracotta tones, and the kitchen was completely redesigned using wood and stainless steel for the worktop.

We decided to keep the open space that the previous owners had obtained for the upper floor by removing the divisions for the rooms in the original project. Maintaining this versatile space, our renovations focused on the bathroom, closet, and replacing the flooring with wood flooring like the original that we discovered when stripping the paint from the stairs. The bathroom floor was replaced and half of the walls were covered with the same terrazzo used on the ground floor. Additionally, a custom sink was made from the same material with a terracotta colored metal frame, and we use the same tone for the shower frames.

The south wall has been designed as a homogeneous piece which, through an important wooden element, covers the entire wall, opens a niche with shelves, projects two large closets and integrates the bedroom closet. Together, the material palette, neutral tones and light finishes match the simplicity of the original project while providing spatial freedom for the user to configure the space to their personal taste.