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Architects: Martin Hurtado Arquitectos
- Year: 2008
Text description provided by the architects. Community and privacy: together but not mixed.
The size of a house is usually set by the extension of the program. In this case: a separate apartment for the homeowners, an average area for the family and an estimated amount of 60 friends, and a third sector for married children with their families.
The site is on a hillside overlooking a river canyon near the coast of central Chile. We opt for a linear arrangement of the program in a single corridor, where the circulation is transformed into a gallery-living room that links the more private bedrooms and services with common spaces, terraces and landscape in a continuous gathering place. The need for privacy, characteristic of a vacation home, is calibrated by breaks in the gallery-corridor forming pockets of intimacy. There is no predominant orientation, and we expressly avoid the frontal view. On the circulation path, the gathered people and the landscape are protagonists. A large wall with small perforations protects the privacy of the public street and houses in its folds differentiated accesses for the homeowners and their guests.
The materials are determined by a resource economy: exposed concrete, steel and glass crudely finished by local labor.
The house, by its nature and extent, hosts an act of celebration: that of its owners, their family and 60 friends.
