Material
Building the cliff back into itself
For three years on the Lima coast we tinted concrete with local pozzolan until the wall stopped reading as a wall and started reading as ground.
We spent the first winter on site arguing about a single color. The client wanted the house to disappear into the headland above Punta Hermosa, and disappearing, it turns out, is a question of pigment, not form. Grey cement looked like a parking structure dropped onto a dune.
The dust does half the work
So we stopped fighting the desert and let it finish the surface for us. Mixing red pozzolan and the sand dug from the lot gives the rammed-earth panels a warmth that ordinary render never reaches — and the matte face holds the dust that blows up off the cliff each afternoon, so the building keeps tuning itself toward the dune behind it.
A wall that gathers dust on purpose is no longer architecture sitting on a landscape. It is the landscape, given a door.