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Architects: ritmo arquitectos
- Area: 520 m²
- Year: 2021
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Lead Architect: Juan José Álvarez Sanz
Text description provided by the architects. Surrounded by a native guadua forest, Milguaduas strives to belong to its environment and fit seamlessly in a descending terrain. The house goes beyond being immersed in nature. It builds up expectations by presenting an introverted first impression with its pristine white walls, a guadua screen that reveals glimpses inward, as well as an optical illusion that conceals the entrance.
The house abstracts representative traits from the Colombian Coffee Grower Cultural Landscape (PCCC) rural houses, in order to reinterpret conventional archetypes in a contemporary context, thus seeking timelessness. A broad plinth guards the white walls against reaching the floor, hollowed from the inside to double as the home office’s shelf area, all while creating seats in the outline of the house facing the forest. Around this surrounding bench lies a traditional corridor encircled by a slender iron handrail. This railing detaches the essence of the traditional macanaspindles, standing almost transparently before the landscape. In turn, these features are sheltered by eaves at the ends of the gable roof, traditional in shape and material.
The project integrates the principle of assigning areas for different activities, formulated by Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer. As a result, the house is divided into two cores: a leisure wing and a gathering wing. In its formal structure, the leisure area is enclosed by a gable roof partitioned into three units. By contrast, the gathering area is sheltered under both a continuous gable roof and a habitable rooftop inspired by the modernist movement. Thereby, leisure and gathering spaces interact irregularly with each other through the guadua screen. This curtain-like segmentation shapes the façade, while folding inwards to bring the vertical guadua into the home and creating a stately descending entryway to the social area, thus reinforcing the blurred connection between both cores.
The house prioritizes its gathering area as a broad space that generates interaction on different levels while keeping the hierarchy between rooms filled with singularity and proportion. A guadua tunnel acts as framing for the forest at its end and builds expectation by revealing glances of what happens downstairs. The living room access goes from narrowness to openness, where the viewer’s attention is absorbed by the shadowlike strips projected on the cement tiles as if originated in the forest. At the same level, the kitchen is located at the heart of the house, where the absence of walls allows a peripheral relation to its surrounding rooms. The dining room, roofed yet open-ended, works as a middle ground between the inside and outside of the house’s cladding. Here, partially shielded by a guaduaportico, the terrace is frequented by local exotic wildlife.
Milguaduas draws on natural resources to foster a sustainable environment in materials as well as its layout, thus reducing its environmental and energetic impact. The design selects exclusively five materials as its language: locally sourced guadua bamboo, pristine white walls, poured concrete, welded black metal, and baked clay. In their purity, the materials have a monochrome and texture-rich tone. By establishing independence between roof and cladding, as well as in the gable roof and habitable roofing being dislocated, the interiors avail themselves of natural light and ventilation. This displacement is mirrored by arranging a layered descent adhering to the terrain, where rooms are laid out downwards while enabling areas for lingering. The habitable roofing acts as a canal for rainwater harvesting, lying between the traditional clay gable roof which draws a frame enclosing the forest. This plate, as well as the sculptural folded staircase that leads to it, gives off a breath of modernity among traditional archetypes.
