Casa Roma
2009, social club, Mexico city
Casa Roma is an old house of the 19th century in the barrio Roma, 76 th street of Orizaba.
The project seeks to enforce a strong reduction in the construction costs, striping away useless or superfluous work. The purpose of Casa Roma is to open a truly unique place where you feel at home, free, where nothing is imposed, where you know that you can eat and drink for a reasonble price, where you can have a calm conversation and perhaps meet people who share the same simple pleasures, or where you can just spend the morning day with a tea, then come back after noon to read under the sun until the evening concert...
Architecture
Pleasure comes from a very simple convenience : a state of well-being. Feel good, drink or eat where you want. Do not divide and impose rules or functions in the house, allow everyone to feel welcomed in all the spaces.
Make the house alive again without transforming it into a suite of white spaces like an architect would have done, but rather by letting people see the evolution of the place, the signs of past (approach of the artist). It is an architecture of alterations and retouched only where it needs it. The usual is unusual and the unusual becomes ordinary.
Helmut Newton
project for the terrace
Barbet Schroeder, "More"
Philosophy
To express simplicity, beauty, creativity, happiness, poetry, complexity, magic, humor, provocation, culture, in all what we eat or what we see. Spaces are not freezed. The physical property becomes active. We can buy the cup in which we drink a tea or the chair on which we sit. All what is exposed can also be sold.
You can talk about politics with the chef or just sit in an armchair to read old newspapers.
To drink a whiskey older than you.
You feel comfortable not so much for its sophisticated part but precisely for its simple, harmonious side.
The first purpose of Casa Roma is not to make money, but to set an affordable price where everybody is comfortable.
Casa Roma is a platform and a meeting place of other projects. It will be permanently propose all kind of activities.
3 units of commerce :
- a restaurant
- a bar with variety (you can drink a very cheap wine or a very famous champagne)
- cultural and social projects (projections, concerts, theater, workshops, reading, expositions, plays, ...)
