Text description provided by the architects. ARCHIPELAGO HOUSE explores a fragmented architecture. It uses the TYPE at a domestic scale, fragmenting the program while it promotes interaction in interstitial spaces. It is located north of Peru, in Piura, Vichayito, away from the shore and quite isolated in the vastness of the desert. We are interested not only in the typical ocean view, but in the beautiful view of the dunes and the Peruvian desert.
We use the idea of assembling different pieces that can accommodate many uses and users. This assembly rethinks the relationship between the volumes, between exterior and interior spaces. Its isolated condition ignores fronts and sides, it is to be explored from all sides and to perceive the environment in multiple ways.
Although it is located on a trapezoidal site, the assembly is oblivious to the perimeter, creating and implementing its own order on the ground. Each volume has a specific function and specific spatial conditions. Thus, the living room, master bedroom, secondary bedrooms and service volume are set apart to create tension between them, creating informal spaces to meet and carry out various activities. Thus appear the indeterminate uses between buildings.
We intervene the steep slope on the north-south axis with a podium that seeks to dilate limits and contain the space. As in the works of Mies van der Rohe, this podium allows us to transform the land into a clear boundary of the pieces it contains. These appear like members of undifferentiated bodies, and acquire the logic of an archipelago: a group of islands in a sea that separates and joins them at the same time.
We choose a sterile materiality for differentiating the architecture from the environment; so as to reveal the presence of an artificial object in nature. We also intend for the architecture to be transparent, allowing us to see through the volumes to perceive the Pacific Ocean from the desert dunes.
The access is made up from the tension between abstract prisms. The main bedroom is a 6m cube, independent, altered by its spatial requirements and views. The interior is austere, pine wood is used in a rustic state. Different views are part of the interior experience, looking to dilate it to new limits. The exterior floor becomes a continuous material, a rug that slips through the podium, framing the little vegetation of the Peruvian desert.
The main hall is designed using a horizontal, open and transparent volume. A unique roof of a single level generates the necessary shade to house the various social activities. The subsequent bedroom volumes are taller to take advantage of distant views. The podium appears as a unifying element for the volumes, but differentiating from the environment. The residual spaces, contained by groups of volumes, blur the boundary between self and other, linking the horizon.
Finally, the project responds to the pursuit of an architecture conscious of its past and liberated from its limits, that intends to be abstract, transparent, fluid and open.
