Tucson
Ibarra Rosano Design Architects
The client for this house in the desert
outside Tucson, Ariz., knew what architects to approach when
he was looking for a house to buy. He had known Luis Ibarra
of Ibarra Rosano Design in college, so he called Ibarra and
his partner, Teresa Rosano when he saw one of the firm’s
kitchen designs featured in the newspaper. Eventually though,
the client began to think about building from the ground up.
"He was trying to figure out if
he could build the kind of house that he wanted," Ibarra
said. "He described the house that he was looking for:
fairly unusual, with big windows, and more of an industrial
aesthetic."
Since Rosano and Ibarra were involved
so early in the project, they were able to consult informally
on the client’s search for a lot. Initially, he focused
on a site down the hill from the one he settled on, but Ibarra
and Rosano were uninspired. When he found the eventual site
of his house, the architects knew that he had found something
special. Special, and difficult.
"We did warn him that the excavation
was going to be pretty intense," Ibarra said. Though
the site did come with one particular benefit: "The people
who were selling the lot knew it would be tough to work with,"
Rosano said, "so our client got a pretty good deal."
With the site in hand, the client trusted
his architects to take his program and turn it into a house—without
much input from him.
"He was willing to work with adapting
to the site, rather than adapting the site to fit him,"
Ibarra said. The client had spent some time living in a formerly
industrial loft space on the East Coast, and enjoyed that
experience, and the house Ibarra and Rosano designed for him
reflect that loft aesthetic.
"The words he used were ‘innovative’
and ‘different,’" Rosano said. "He didn’t
specifically ask that it be loft like, but he did specifically
ask for big windows."
The architects worked with a detailed topographical map of
the site, and pretty much fit the plan into the existing landscape,
which was important since the earth was mostly solid rock.
The landscape also determined the house’s construction
materials, both for environmental and aesthetic reasons. They
were inspired by the work of one of their mentors.
"There was a house further up the
hill designed by an architecture professor of ours,"
Ibarra said. "It was built out of concrete block. It
was something that we had studied in school and that had been
brewing in our minds for a while."
The architects chose block for the construction,
since it could be craned directly onto the site without disturbing
the delicate desert vegetation that surrounds the house. As
native Arizonans, Ibarra and Rosano understood some of the
issues that surround living in the desert.
"You don’t need a lot to live
in the desert, because the technologies of the day make it
easy, but you do that at the expense of natural resources,"
Ibarra said. "To live in the desert you need a willingness
to accept that it’s hot here. Technological solutions
to the environment are a bit of a cop-out, and they’re
not really the solution. A concrete floor keeps the body cool
because it’s cool throughout the day and it absorbs heat.
Self-shading of the building—that’s a lesson learned
from desert plants that can shade 60% of themselves at a time."
"Luis and I are both native Arizonans,"
Rosano added, "so we really understand this place, and
it’s really unlike any other place. It’s a place
of extremes."
Kevin Lerner
Gross square
footage
2,150 sq ft
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