In Casa Eva, a three-story apartment building on Mexico’s Pacific coast, S-AR turns a 12×15 meter concrete grid into something closer to a game board, where stairs, plunge pools, and sunshades occupy fixed positions like pieces set down on a board. The Monterrey-based studio designed the project as multifamily housing in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, on a site that slopes down toward the sea. What holds the building together is not walls, but a structural logic that keeps rearranging what counts as inside and outside.
Sloping site conditions mean each of the three apartments claims a different relationship to the landscape around it, immediate and distant at once. The lower and upper units read the surrounding vegetation differently — one folding into the tree canopy, another opening toward a longer view of mountains and, further out, the sea. A comparable logic of building in dialogue with existing trees shaped Casa en Avándaro, elsewhere in Mexico, though here the site’s incline does the work that a preserved void does there.
A reticular concrete structure of cast-in-place columns, beams, and slabs sets the building’s real dimensions: a 12×15 meter perimeter grid that frames what is otherwise a mostly open volume. Enclosure is kept to a minimum — railings, and translucent wooden lattice boxes screening the bedrooms — so that the grid itself, rather than any wall, is what a visitor reads as the building’s edge. In a different register, the expressive use of exposed concrete running through Casa Tláloc makes a useful comparison: two very different climates, both letting the material’s own logic set the architectural terms.
Column spacing follows a 3-meter interval, with a clear height of 2.85 meters through most of each level and a taller 4.05 meters at ground floor, where the site’s natural slope forces a change in elevation. These aren’t incidental numbers — they’re the module the whole building runs on, repeated enough times that the structure starts to feel less like a frame and more like a unit of measurement for everyday life.
Each apartment layout covers 180 square meters and includes two bedrooms, service areas, and social spaces sized generously enough to include a private plunge pool for cooling off — a detail that reads less like an amenity and more like a response to the coastal heat the building sits in. Space, air, and light are meant to move through each level with as little resistance as possible.
Independent volumes, some detached from the slabs, others intersecting or crossing between floors, are what generate that sense of continuity rather than interrupt it. Interior blocks containing service areas sit inside the plan almost like furniture that happens to be structural, occasionally taking on load-bearing duty at points where the slab needs the support.
A spatial game plays out within the reticular frame, where stairs, pools, sunshades, kitchens, and storage occupy the grid from both inside and outside, each claiming its own position the way pieces occupy squares on a board. It’s an old vocabulary — beam-and-column construction — pushed into a genuinely different reading, one that opens the building up to circulation routes that don’t behave like conventional hallways.
A large palapa roof gathers the whole composition under a single gesture, tying the building back to Oaxaca’s coastal building traditions and to a local, inherited understanding of climate and craft. It’s the one element in the project that isn’t concrete, steel, or wood acting structurally — it’s simply shelter, borrowed from a much older logic than the grid underneath it.
One smaller detail stays with you after the grid, the pools, and the palapa: the wooden lattice boxes that screen each bedroom were sized for privacy first, and only afterward do they turn out to filter the coastal light into the kind of texture a solid wall never could.
Casa Eva by S-AR | Location: Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico — Year: 2026 — Key materials: Concrete, Wood, Steel