Mar Mediterraneo 34 Housing Units

The restored façade of Mar Mediterraneo 34 Housing Units operates as a layered text encoding multiple symbolic registers through its architectural vocabulary, material choices, and compositional relationships. The mansard roof profile, with its distinctive broken slope, carries associations with French Second Empire elegance and bourgeois respectability, speaking to aspirational values and cultural sophistication that transcended regional boundaries during the nineteenth century. The pyramidal tower crowning the composition introduces vertical aspiration, a gesture toward the celestial that punctuates the horizontal urban streetscape and establishes the building's presence as a landmark within its context. The central oculus window, framed by its elaborate cartouche, functions as a symbolic eye or solar disc, an ancient architectural motif suggesting watchfulness, enlightenment, and the presence of consciousness within the dwelling. Its circular form creates sacred geometric resonance, the eternal wholeness of the circle contrasting with the rectangular rationality of surrounding fenestration. The tripartite vertical division honors classical architectural traditions distinguishing base, body, and crown, corresponding to earthly, human, and celestial realms. Warm light emanating from within suggests hearth and home, the primal comfort of shelter and gathering, while the cool blue envelope of twilight represents the outer world's vastness. The wrought-iron balconettes, with their organic scrollwork patterns, introduce botanical symbolism, iron transformed through craft into vegetal forms suggesting growth and cultivation. Light trails at ground level encode temporal passage, reminding observers that architecture exists within the flow of time and movement, not merely as static object but as participant in urban choreography. The restoration itself carries profound symbolic weight as an act of cultural memory, a commitment to continuity that honors ancestral craft while adapting tradition for contemporary habitation, demonstrating that heritage structures can accommodate present needs without surrendering their essential character.

Mar Mediterraneo 34 emerges as a strategy to give a second life to an eclectic style house in advance deterioration built in 1910. Multiple artistic and artisanal elements were recovered from the main facade. The main patio is reconstructed as a reinterpretation of the past, portraying the arrangement of the old portals as a sequence of light and shadow, these openings rise intermittently in double height from a volcanic stone baseboard and become a solid element of introspective architecture. The restored house has 3 levels with 7 apartments that adapt to different spaces.