Orange Lemon House / Daniel Moreno Flores + Santiago Vaca Jaramillo

Curated by Clara Ott

Architects: Daniel Moreno Flores, Santiago Vaca Jaramillo
Area: 65 m²
Year: 2017
Photographs:Andrés Villota Pelusa, Santiago Vaca Jaramillo
Lead Architects: Daniel Moreno Flores - Santiago Vaca Jaramillo

Text description provided by the architects. A home destined to become quickly a definitive home because the owners were looking for a house that would allow them to leave the rental department soon and thus stop paying endless fees. The challenge was to design the project in a month and to build the house of 65m2 in two months. A house which had to be an affordable one, for this purpose blunt design strategies were defined: to create a structural constructive system that requires little time of execution and covers a large area.

Initially, the owners looked for a house of containers, nevertheless they required ample spaces, also had to cover them and modify them the reason why the sense of its reuse was lost. For that reason, a system of corrugated rod trusses that allows containing spaces was defined concretely and virtually, besides the importance of structuring with our own measures for different uses.

The foundation was built quickly with the leftovers from the rods and they were made as piles. The modulation of the house is a function of the material (the trusses are 7.2 meters long), so it is distributed every 1.20 m x 2.40 m in height to receive industrial plates and reduce execution costs. However, in such a fast process we leave space for the spontaneous and the definition in the work in progress.

Orange Lemon House / Daniel Moreno Flores + Santiago Vaca Jaramillo - Interior Photography, Kitchen, Beam — © Andrés Villota Pelusa

With all those involved, multiple meetings were held that generated a sense of belonging, and in a process of maturation of the project it was decided to use pieces of Radiata Pinewood for the secondary structure; and the closings of the house that are placed inside the structure, in order to gain a comfortable feeling in the interior spaces.

The habitable spaces are fragmented as volumes, to have better contact with the exteriors, to allow plant growth between the blocks and also deprive views by the different displacements. As a small house, possible future growth is planned. The diagonals of the trusses and the wooden diagonals that structure the house crosswise define the shapes of the house. The result is a cozy house that allows them to formulate new challenges.