In Mérida, Mexico, on the Yucatán peninsula, TÁNAT is building Casa Ínsula together with PEMO and Carlos García Noriega, a single elongated concrete volume whose window openings hold no glass, no frames and no sills.
Casa Ínsula stands in Mérida, and it is not finished. The house was still listed as an ongoing project as of 2025, which is worth saying first, because most of what makes it worth looking at belongs to the state it is in now rather than the state it is heading toward.
It runs to 2,150 square feet, arranged as a single elongated volume rather than a stacked series of them. That decision does most of the planning. The work is shared: TÁNAT designed it with PEMO and Carlos García Noriega, working alongside Diego Rivero Borrell, Daniel Pereira and Mariana Estrada, with construction by Taller Mid51.
The window openings hold no glass, no frames and no sills. The poured concrete stops and the opening begins, which turns each one into a question of shape rather than of specification. They vary from room to room. One is a full-height narrow vertical slot. One is low and round. One carries a curved lower edge. A circular skylight is cut through the roof slab and drops a column of daylight into the main room.
Left unglazed and unfurnished, the house would take rain directly. Plants would root through the floor and climb the walls. Within a few years bats and birds would share the space in shifts, and dripping water would wear through the concrete into the limestone beneath, the same process that carves the peninsula's cenotes. That is the account published with the project, and it is written in the conditional throughout: a description of what would happen, not a statement of what will.
So the whole thing hinges on the glazing. Put windows in and it is a house in Mérida. Leave them out and it becomes a slow test of what the ground does to a building that has been left open to it. For now the building sits between those two outcomes, which is a position few houses are ever photographed in and fewer still are allowed to stay in.
