Casa Max Borges Recio
Max Borges Recio
Miramar
1950
Max Borges Jr.’s own house in Miramar (1950) embodies the machine aesthetic of Le Corbusier by incorporating such radical elements as ribbon windows, pilotis, and an open floor plan to achieve a clear rational structure. The house is conceived as an L-shaped cube elevated on stilts with a garage and service quarters occupying the rear portion of the lot. The garden is raised one level up on fill with a stone retaining wall wrapping around the corner lot. An open stair bisects the cube to provide direct access from the street to the elevated garden at the back. The main floor is accessed by a suspended stair in the front and is open in plan except for the kitchen. Sliding glass doors provide transparency between the public living spaces and the terraced garden, and an art-deco like curved stair rail is the signature feature of the interior. The upper floor contains bedrooms, baths and a small pantry. The main façade is a relentlessly flat plane with continuous ribbon windows at the top and a running wooden lattice (no longer existing) to provide shade. The pure white volume floating above the landscape on stilts with a stone wall supporting an elevated garden could have easily fit into in any number of Mediterranean locations given its international sensibility.
