Cliff Dwellings
The Risco Residences consist of a group of nine homes located on the Risco de San Nicolás in the city of Las Palmas. The need to adapt the residences to the challenging topography necessitated two key design decisions. The first was to arrange the homes in lateral strips along a central access band. The second was to work on a very small scale, designing each home individually, responding to the specific conditions of the terrain on which each is situated.
The result is a project where each home is unique, with interior spaces connected more by staircases and vertical openings than by doors. In the design process, the third dimension becomes the key element, as it is necessary to break away from the "flat" conception of housing and work with free height. The Risco Residences move away from the idea of housing as a horizontal relationship of planes and instead focus on a vertical relationship of volumes.
