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Architects: Duque Motta & AA
- Area: 340 m²
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Pablo Casals Aguirre
Text description provided by the architects. The project is located in Chicureo, a suburb of Santiago, occupying half of a 5,000 m² lot. The assignment was to design a one-level house to facilitate mobility, which should take over the entire plot’s extension, solve an uncomfortable orientation, and respond well to the local climatic conditions The project is proposed with two displaced orthogonal volumes, one that follows the land’s perimeter lines and houses the most public programs of the house. The other one is displayed in a north-south axis containing the bedrooms.
This difference in angles and the displacement between volumes allows the living-dining space and the main bedroom to have a privileged condition of opening views and visual dominance of the site. At the same time, this volumes arrangement divides the plot into 3 large free areas, an access and parking area, very open and transparent towards the street, the rear garden area with the entire width of the plot, protected in its privacy by the house itself, and the playground that surrounds the volume of rooms and is protected with a palisade towards the access and the street.
With a square plan and a considerable bay, the two volumes have a central patio that allows north light to enter their main spaces (south hemisphere) because they are disposed towards the south to link them to the house main garden. Besides, the project’s circulations are arranged around these patios, which act as spatial articulators, separating the different programs but visually linking them. The façade design is proposed based on a perimeter structure that responds to the climatic conditions of the place, a lot of heat and strong sunlight in summer, and a terrain that concentrates a lot of humidity in winter.
Eaves are defined to protects the facade planes from the vertical sun and direct rain, a perimeter sidewalk seeks to keep moisture away from the house, and a facade plane composed of an interior concrete wall, which delivers thermal inertia, exterior insulation, and a ventilated wooden facade that prevents direct radiation and moisture. This perimeter concrete structure formally defines the house. It projects the continuity of the house's floor and ceiling planes towards the facades and proposes four diagonal buttresses in the corners that highlight the volume’s edges’ total length. This structure seeks to build a facade with thickness and depth, using concrete with all its expression capacities. It defines a structural volumetric frame that contains the interior spaces and terraces of the house, which are expressed with the wood warmth, and the glass transparency.
