House of Stones is an unbuilt family residence for four in Quito that treats the site’s layered phenomena as a brief. A low, horizontal order translates a cluttered front edge and a productive rear orchard into monolithic rooms and porous intervals, so that thick-walled refuges, a cracked gray slab, and field-like courtyards fold the orchard, mist, and distant Andean ridge into daily life. Stones gathered on site, colorless surfaces, and a bare roof align material gravity with a direct, ground-oriented tectonic.
House of Stones Technical Information
- Architects: Jorge Alejandro
- Location: Quito, Ecuador
- Project Year: 2022
- Images: © Jorge Alejandro
In this place, the inside is already an outside. The boundaries blur and the landscape seeps into every surface.
– Jorge Alejandro
Site Phenomena as Design Brief
The project reads the site as a set of tensions that call for a single architectural frame. A noisy, improvised front condition contrasts with the quiet productivity of the rear orchard. Rather than erase these differences, the scheme compresses them into a single ground strategy: a low, continuous disposition that gathers disparate elements into a measured horizontality. The stance recalls scattered stones across the terrain and the pale, distant volumes that align against the Andean ridge and eucalyptus forest.
Prehistoric precedents and geomorphology provide a conceptual armature. References to dolmens suggest shelter formed by mass and plane, while the erosive action that hollows the ground becomes a model for carving voids between solids. The house translates these figures into rooms that act as protective boulders and interstices that read as eroded channels, so circulation, air, and light move through the composition with the logic of a landscape rather than a corridor-based interior.
Massing and Spatial Organization
Habitable rooms are conceived as monolithic volumes with thick walls, a strategy that prioritizes refuge, acoustic depth, and thermal inertia. These chambers are not perimeter-bound objects but embedded masses that establish a slow, introverted scale for bedrooms and more open, proportional figures for shared areas. Wall thickness is used as a spatial instrument, absorbing storage, seating niches, and apertures calibrated to frame orchard and mountain rather than street frontage.
Between the masses, a cracked gray slab defines interstitial zones. Its surface compresses movement at joints, then relaxes to form small courts and places to pause. This slab organizes a field of solids and voids in which courtyards, roofed passages, and open intervals negotiate interior and exterior continuously. Doors and windows are secondary to the sectional relationship between mass and gap, so thresholds feel inherent to the geometry rather than applied as fixtures.
Material and Tectonic Strategy
Stone gathered on site sets the project’s material tone and its gravitational character. The architect treats the house as a constructed geology, letting local stone inform foundations, landscape markers, and margins where wall meets ground. The decision to keep the walls colorless and the roof bare minimizes the need for mediation. Vegetation and changing light register directly on surfaces, allowing the architecture to act as a lens for seasonal and daily shifts in the orchard and the surrounding mist.
Tectonically, the project aligns dolmen-like mass with planar horizontals that echo the straightforward constructive order of neighboring houses. Load-bearing walls read as weighty and continuous, while the slab and roof planes are expressed as calm spans that tether the ensemble to the ground. This clarity favors legible joints, restrained detailing, and materials left close to their natural state, an approach that privileges permanence, repairability, and an economy of means over cosmetic finish.
Landscape, Thresholds, and Orientation
In the rear garden, discrete stones act as landmarks that mark entries and articulate the edge between house and orchard. These markers calibrate threshold depth so that movement from interior to exterior passes through gradients of shade, enclosure, and exposure. The orchard is not treated as a view-only backdrop but as a programmatic extension where domestic routines fold into cultivation, harvest, and outdoor gathering.
Boundaries are intentionally porous. Vegetation threads through the interstices, and reflected greens tint the otherwise neutral walls. Openings are placed to align breezes through the field of masses, while framed views catch the eucalyptus canopy and the pale band of distant buildings. The family program is dispersed across this continuum, allowing private rooms to hold seclusion within thick masonry and shared spaces to expand into courts where the house merges with the productive ground that precedes it.
About Jorge Alejandro
Jorge Alejandro is an architect based in Quito, Ecuador. Since founding his practice, Alejandro engages architecture as a response to the logic of terrain, materials, and use. His work infuses tectonic clarity with spatial and environmental nuance, translating site phenomena into elemental forms. The practice builds with a deep regard for constructional legibility, natural materials, and landscape integration.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Architect: Jorge Alejandro
- Drawings: Jorge Alejandro
