Coo Lodge / Ortuzar Gebauer Arquitectos

Curated by Danae Santibañez

Architects: Ortuzar Gebauer Arquitectos
Area: 160 m²
Year: 2016
Photographs:Federico Cairoli

The Place
The place has an unbeatable view where the volcanoes appear like a white mantle on the horizon and the tide goes down abruptly and let’s see different layers on the ground: a beautiful sandy beach, then stones with sand and after that, ordered stones that draw circular geometries between the beach and the sea. At that moment, the place whispers its history to us.

The first inhabitants, seamen, the Chonos or Payos as they are known in the area, were nomadic navigators, who left their traces in the sea, their fishing corrals.
To discover their vestiges was to discover their vernacular condition, it was to discover a culture. The above opened our senses to work on the pre-existing.

The cleanliness of the place, allowed to recover a beautiful beach with white sand dunes, which during the last years had been covered with large shin of weeds. The place re-appeared and allowed us to give sign planning to design around an experience of the place.

The Project
In the reappearance of the place, three clear levels showed themselves: The first one was a green field to which one can access from the road; A more rocky intermediate level that was hidden under the grass, and a third one that forming the beach of white sand dunes that reaches the sea in a rocky way.

The project was placed in the intermediate layer, in a fractional way, accommodating it to its geography with volumes proposed independently of each other, sculptural, like big rocks of the sea tied by free circulations which organize the space like trails through architecture.

It was recognize in the project, its condition of exterior, of beach, through terraces and circulations communicated with each other, which extends and communicate to trails, dunes, always dominating the views on the immensity of the sea.
From the access, architecture only insinuate itself, inviting to discover this new encounter with the place. A bridge, as an arm, invites to see it.

The enclosures being separated, are intimate, typical of the visitors who keep them in their status as a nomad in the place. A great volume is the space of encounter, public space, exposed, that around the fire and the kitchen, invites to live according to the logic of the rural ensemble in Chiloé.

Recycling
With the use of old zinc plates, recycled from old constructions, the Project was born with history and becomes part of the place, the temporal and the ancestral. The red color of the oxide, similar to the color of the ground, makes architecture part of the place as a piece of land, like a rock.