La modernización de la casa burguesa en Cuenca: estrategias de proyecto en la casa Peña (1954) y la casa Vázquez (1962)

Abstract

Historically, the house has been constituted as the fundamental space that allows the realization of domestic activities, family interrelationship and the development and strengthening of the personal self. Several authors agree that during the twentieth century the greatest alterations in social structures, city environments and housing and its spaces took place (Cañar & Torres, 2018); becoming the laboratory of theoretical experimentation and practical application of modern lifestyles (Añón, 2013). In Ecuador, the social, economic and political transformations at the beginning of the century were parallel to the technological and energy transformations, which with greater or lesser delay reached Cuenca. This research proposes to study the modernization of the bourgeois house in Cuenca, based on the identification and analysis of the applied project strategies, in the Peña House (1954) and the Vázquez House (1962), by the architect Cesar Burbano Moscoso. These houses have been characterized by innovation and the search for a new way of living, assuming the changes that the city demanded in the mid-twentieth century. In both cases it is evident how the traditional typology of a house with an interior patio, centrally organized, aligned and connected to the road, is inverted and transformed into a radically opposite typology, composed of isolated structures and withdrawn from the street, thus modifying the internal relations to the house and with the city. The study explored architectural processes, approaching the interest in recognizing criteria and values that come from the works, as well as architectural and urban elements of a particular moment of Cuenca architecture.

Keywords: Modern architecture, modern housing, transformations of domestic space, Cesar Burbano Moscoso, Cuenca-Ecuador