In Mérida, Mexico, Ludwig Godefroy has composed a striking meditation on negative space with Casa Soskil, a residence that inverts the conventional relationship between built form and landscape.
Rather than designing a house with an adjacent garden, Godefroy has envisioned a garden with a house—a radical rethinking where the void, the open air, and the living canopy of trees define the architecture itself. Here, the emptiness is not residual; it is the origin, the generator of form and life.
Floating geometric structures frame the pre-existing trees, shaping monumental openings that orchestrate views, modulate privacy, and invite nature to dominate the spatial experience. These gestures protect the inhabitants from the encroaching gaze of the neighbors while cultivating a profound sense of interiority in the open air. The result is a home that feels less inhabited than it is inhabited-by the trees, the shifting light, and the breathing garden itself.
Casa Soskil is also an essay in contrasts, composed from the site’s natural dualities. At the sun-drenched front, life gathers around a swimming pool and solarium, a bright arena of social energy. Toward the shaded back, life slows into introspection, with a fire pit, daybed rooms, and a study embedded among the filtered shadows. This deliberate fragmentation of domesticity into poles of activity and repose transforms movement through the house into a rhythmic dance between light and shade.
The boundaries between inside and outside dissolve completely. Bedrooms float among the trees like shelters on stilts, while the garden itself becomes the connective tissue of daily life. Godefroy’s project is less an object placed in a site than a choreography of existing conditions, a living, breathing environment where the architecture bows gracefully to the authority of the void.
