LivingMexico City

In Mexico City, a courtyard house breathes through a veil of perforated brick

Taller Norte's Casa Celosía uses a double skin of locally pressed brick to cool, shade and screen a family home on a tight urban lot.

Words Priya Anand 17 Aug 2026 5 min read

In Mexico City, a courtyard house breathes through a veil of perforated brick

Photography courtesy of the studio

The lot is eight metres wide, hemmed in on three sides, and faces a loud avenue in Colonia Doctores. Taller Norte's response is a house that turns entirely inward — organised around a planted courtyard and wrapped in a celosía, a perforated brick lattice that has cooled Mexican buildings for centuries.

The lattice does several jobs at once. It cuts direct solar gain on the west facade by roughly 70 per cent, lets the house ventilate passively through the stack effect of the courtyard, and gives the family privacy without blinds or tinted glass. At night it reverses: the house glows through the perforations like a lantern.

Inside, the palette is limited to three materials — the same pressed brick, pigmented concrete floors, and tropical hardwood recovered from the demolition of the previous structure on the site. Rooms are arranged as a spiral climbing the courtyard, ending in a roof terrace shaded by the lattice's final course.

Casa Celosía joins a wave of Latin American housing that treats climate response as the primary aesthetic decision rather than a technical afterthought. The result is a home whose most photogenic feature is also its mechanical system.