In Fractal House, Manuel Calderón envisions a space that folds in on itself, as if seeking in its own geometry the logic of its construction. The floor plan of this imagined dwelling rises from the pattern of a single tile that composes its own floor—a minimal form that, through repetition, generates a complex volume. The house is thus built from its base, but also from the repetition of lived experience, as if the space retained the memory of every gesture it has held.
The project stems from a recurring concern in the artist’s work: the tension between inner experience and the architectural structures that contain it. Even before the pandemic, Calderón had been exploring the oppressive nature of domestic space, its potential to mirror the mind and, at the same time, the social order. During confinement, that intuition became a collective condition: the house became, for many, a closed world, a self-referential form where time and space began to curve.
Fractal House proposes inhabiting a form closer to nature than to functional logic. This speculative drawing explores a type of architecture that evokes fractals—organic figures of infinite self-similarity—openly opposed to the rigid, economic geometry of social housing. Still, the outcome maintains traces of that rigidity: the complex form does not fully escape the structures it tries to exceed. The project does not idealize; rather, it reveals a paradox: even when we inhabit what appears singular, we remain embedded in a system that multiplies without transformation.
The house becomes a symbolic figure: an architecture of consciousness, where infinity seems to shimmer, yet remains contained within the finite.
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