In the dense woodland of La Primavera in Zapopan, Jalisco, Ana Victoria Pérez-Gil and Saúl Figueroa set PRM39, a house fragmented into volumes threaded by courtyards, gardens and walkways above a ravine.
PRM39 stands inside La Primavera forest in Zapopan, Jalisco, on ground shaped by two facts the studio chose to work with rather than against: “a highly dense body of existing trees and a natural ravine toward the back of the property.” The house reads the site before it touches it, treating the woodland less as a backdrop than as the first term of the plan.
The response is deliberately light. Precise operations preserve the existing trees and open a gradual transition from the density of the forest to the clearing above the ravine. Rather than clear a footprint and drop a single mass onto it, the design threads itself through what already grows there, so the building arrives as a guest among trunks and canopy.
That logic fragments the program into distinct volumes, articulated by courtyards, gardens and walkways that stretch daily life across the whole site. The gaps between the pieces do real work. “The voids function as spaces for connection, climate regulation, and continuity with the landscape,” the studio writes, and the house is lived through movement between open and contained rooms, long and close-up views, shade and shifts in scale.
Most of the program stays on the ground floor, where a single walkway links the parts and sets the relationship between built form and terrain, “allowing the forest to remain a constant part of domestic life.” The secondary bedrooms rise to an upper level reached through a stair core, a vertical marker that gives the low, dispersed complex a point of reference amid the vegetation.
Materially, the house holds to “a restrained palette of stucco, stone, and wood” across its volumes, courtyards, floors and millwork. These are surfaces meant to age, left to weathering and forest conditions that will slowly transform them. The planting keeps the same patience, extending the existing environment with free-growing, low-maintenance endemic species, until it becomes harder to say where the forest ends and the house begins.
