Casa en Culebra / RSVP Architects
Located between Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, the Island of Culebra is a popular vacation area thanks to its beautiful beaches and perfect weather. RSVP Architects have designed a simple vacation home which can provide for a variety of activities while occupied by its summer users.
More about the home and more images after the break.
The home is comprised of one wooden box that houses the private activities and one corrugated metal box that houses the public activities. These boxes are formed around a concrete base which functions as the core of the residence. A large pool extends off the base of the house while the other side of the home is balanced by an elevated terrace.
Due to the small size of the house, the spaces must be flexible to accommodate a variety of activities. Since the home will only be used for a portion of the year, the boxes can be fully open for the owners to enjoy when occupying the residence, or securely closed to withstand any tropical weather when not in use.
Images courtesy of the studio.
Related articles:
40 comments »
They could have designed the stair in our own style. But now, it has become just a copy of something done by somebody’else.
good renders… not.
awful renders
bad layout, awful renders
good renders… not.
haha
Look at the IDEA!
The concept!
Context!
“OOOOOH… I think… (I think)!” they all exclaimed or, “…huuuuh?”
The renders are early representations in DEVELOPMENT!
You have no idea of the clients, their needs, wants, price or brief to RSVP.
The idea is excellence for what it is.
A place for summer VISITORS.
Lockable & low maintenance.
Is reading difficult for you guys?
Typical that the detractors (all coomments) make retarded, lame crticisms about the cosmetic aspects.
Howard, looking at the idea and concept is a good point. However, you can have a great idea and poorly execute it. This house seems clumsy, and the quality of renderings has a lot to do with that feeling. Graphic representation of ideas is an integral part of our profession. Thus we all feel we can and should comment on the graphics and quality of rendering as much as the concept. Furthermore, if these are the early development images where are the hand drawings, the models, the sketches (they do show one tiny one). With a better attention to media I bet this design would be greatly improved.
RSVP: il est horrible.
Rather than “Casa en Culebra”, “Culebrón” (mid-day soap opera).
FIRST, and I know some will come at me, architecture isn’t the unbuilt and it also cannot be measured by an image, even with the highly unfortunate images above. May be it turns out well (now I’m just being condescendent). Brian, I mean, how can you say in your website you coordinate the Undergraduate Representation Programme at Pratt after this?
SECOND, Archdaily seems to loose grip on editorial content from time to time, or may be now the blog-format finally allows a democratic medium where everything is cover-worthy, but I think Koolhaas and this attempt of a house cannot go hand on hand. The ORDOS cover has been great, full of info and well organized. But this?
THIRD, as a latin-american architect I feel a little ashamed because Puerto Rico is after all kind of latin and it’s hard to look away from the sore sight of the obvious kitsch glare all over the place: it looks like a Neil Denari’s house in a Hiroshima afternoon (the exploded result is also shown in the axonometric view), furnished by the Eames (try sitting on leather at 40º) and on top of that a cat-walked photoshop-pool (with an 80’s model, your typical Carlito’s Way wife style).
Thank you for the opportunity to let me understand how some New York offices operate, though.
this house is simply aggravating.
http://www.archdaily.com/26949/casa-en-culebra-rsvp-architects/core-house/
haha
what a crapy render
The preliminary idea is more important that a good render.
really guys, the graphic expression of this house if poor, bad, tasteless, and not professional. that tiny sketch is laydout as so badly, the blue box’s gonna eat it. as Lucas has said, graphic expression is part of our profession, not to become graphic designers, but because we have to show ideas. try to read a bad looking magazin, in which things are difficult to understand and which doesn’t make you feel like reading it. the ocntect may be good, but would you call it a good magazine?
sucks!! really bad
i like the building, hate the renders, and wonder why the pool is so huge
Interesting comments, have to agree largely with regards to the quality and choice of renders, in a market where presentation sells and opinions can ultimately be drawn at first glance, the some what naive layouts and choice of context would be better off hung in a part I degree studio…..ouch!!
AS RSVP LIKES IT:
Concept=10pts
Architecture=8pts
Renderings =1pt
Total=19/30 pts.
Rank=Poor/Moderate
The head architect of RSVP is also the Dean of a NAAB accredited Architecture School ……………….shame on you sir. If I would be a student at one of your jury I would laugh at YOU I would laugh SO HARD.
the space below the cantilevers is not exciting at all.
Being Puerto Rican and having been to Culebra many, many times (everyone should go, it has one of the world’s best beaches on the north shore of the island!!) I’m lukewarm when it comes to this house.
First of all, the cantilever, or better yet, the raised main living level is common in Puerto Rico for various reasons: hurricane storm surge being the biggest, but also, insects are a nightmare, and various other reasons which I won’t go into here. So I don’t really have an issue with the space below the cantilever not being used. Once again, very common in Puerto Rico
Second, the design, is not representative of traditional Caribbean or Puerto Rican architecture. But why should it be? Maybe the client wanted something more modern. Maybe the client doesn’t want to be like every other house on the island. You can’t forget that at the end of the day, the architect works for a client who may have set the overall tone of the project. Maybe the client didn’t care and left the design to RSVP? My point is, until we know for sure, we most reserve judgement on that count.
Lastly, I don’t think the renderings, or their quality (or lack thereof), are make or break. C’mon folks, one of the great abilities of architects is to be able to envision what others can not. We have the skill and training to see an empty lot, or a horrible fixer-upper and see past it. Surely, you can all look past the renderings at the IDEA, and then judge it on that basis? Can’t you?
As for me, I think the house is OK. I don’t know why you need a pool that big either, especially with the amazing beach nearby. I don’t think this NY firms realizes the beating that wood box is going to take in Culebra. I’m telling you, the first Cat 3 hurricane to come by, will rip all that Cedar (I assume its that) right off!
Oh yeah, and if this guy is a professor at Pratt, etc, and his partner teaches as well, it says something about the state of architectural education at these schools…and it ain’t good folks.
Look, I won’t contend with anybody about the qualities of this design. But I will argue against the order of importance you are assigning to photorealistic representations. I really don’t need these renders to be more polished or photorealistic in order to understand the porject and its intentions, whichever they may be. Literally, for millennia architects have projected and constructed architectural objects without the use of computer generated images. Bottom line, we humans are not so dumb. If we can infer from a planimetric drawing or a physical model how a design will look like, we certainly can do it from a computer generated image, regardless of its level of photorealism. There are just 4 possibilities then…
1)The design is good, with great renders.
2)The dsign is good, with awful renders.
3)The design is bad, with great renders.
4)Design and renders are both nasty.
…sorry RSVP, but i’ll go with nasty.
Oink, oink, oink. Este proyecto se merece que lo archiven en la biblioteca (en el bano, debajo del papel de inodoro).
I really think renders are just a way of expressing an idea, that doesnt mean that it has to be the ultrashiny super real image, good doesnt mean the same that “real”.
If you look at the images that spanish firma Mansilla+Tuñon uses, they are some kind of collages, they dont even render!!
and they are pretty cool images.
here are some samples.
http://img259.imageshack.us/i/90020136qd9.jpg/
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_tOIIjUrs57o/RigujGqu_DI/AAAAAAAAA9s/mLFjo4NR7sU/s320/mansilla_tunon.jpg
lets try to pass trough the image in the surface, and talk about the substance.
Piñol, nice to hear from you… I agree with some of your criticism, both of the project and of the indirect equality implied by it being featured in ArchDaily alongside other truly ingenious architecture.
Nevertheless, as a Puerto Rican, and like it or not, as a fellow Latin American architect, this conversation gets devalued by your statement of us being “kind-of-Latin”. I don’t know which exclusive center of “Latin American-ness” you originally hail from, but the “Latin American” description is the demonym for anyone coming from any part of America (the continents), in which the native language is a Romance language, which, as you’d know, is covered by every part of North, Central and South America located to the south of the USA-Mexico border, including the Caribbean (with the exception of Jamaica, Bahamas, and the rest of the English and Dutch speaking islands). And from what I last recall, my first word this morning to my wife was in Spanish (the same language she used to reply back to me, while reading the Spanish newspaper, while sitting next to my kid who was scolding our dog; in Spanish, mind you!). This might be a crappy project, as there are plenty around, probably just like in your own home country, but regardless of our political situation vis-à-vis the USA, we are as Latin, or more precisely, as Hispanic, as anyone from any other place this side of the ocean, we just happen to hold a US-Citizenship from the day we’re born, with some of us knowing a little English, regardless of the good or bad architecture around us.
Never suggest an insult to a Puerto Rican…….//:
renders are cool and trendy, guys
I don’t know if some architetcs get to wonder why they are getting constantly this type of public humiliation. Are their desires for recognition so wild, or ther egos so monumental, that they completely fail to distinguish between “ok architecture” and trully remarkable architecture. As an advise, this site shouldn’t agree to publish each of the latest antics or caprices of architects, irrespective of which part of the world they come from.
“The preliminary idea is more important that a good render.”
no doubt about that
but seriously, never saw that level of crappy renders in archdaily.
“The head architect of RSVP is also the Dean of a NAAB accredited Architecture School ……………….shame on you sir. If I would be a student at one of your jury I would laugh at YOU I would laugh SO HARD.”
I’m indeed one of the students in the Architecture School of the University of Puerto Rico and I feel really ashamed of this. All of us could do better than this, architecturally and graphically speaking…
Seriously, I feel disgusted that this kind of work is representing Puerto Rico in webpages as ArchDaily with so good work desgined and build here. But of course, RSVP is so obsessed with international recognition that they’re not really noting the constant humiliation that they’re receiving in their projects.
Projects like this, published here in ArchDaily before should be the ones talking about puertorican architecture and not this crap. I’m really pissed!
http://www.archdaily.com/17517/san-pablo-urbana/
http://www.archdaily.com/19994/private-library-ereras-arquitectos/
http://www.archdaily.com/11419/alhambra-house-urbana/
i really like the house, and a think, they’ve done this renders ad purpose, they look really, not profesional, trendy, retro, anti-glam style, whatever you wanna call it, the point is, why you all only care about how architecture is show, and now about the architecture in deed.
very bad for the archdaily readers.
Attention Archdaily staff. There is a confusion regarding RSVP. Apparently, there are two different architectural firms with this name: RSVP. One of them is the San Juan based office, whose principal is indeed the dean of an architecture school. The other one is a Brooklyn based firm. The link “RSVP Architects” in this project is referenced to the wrong firm, the one in New York. Finally, you should revise the ThyssenKrupp Elevator Competition, by RSVP. I might be wrong, but it seems to me this project doesn’t belong to any of these firms. It might be yet another RSVP. I checked in both firms webpages and didn’t find the Krupp Elevator project.
One of Culebra’s finest qualities is the amazing light. I really don’t see how they have made the best use of this extremely dominant element. Why so ‘dark’? Toro Ferrer, Henry Klumb what did you teach us? Anyway, it’s a great intellectual-academic exercise, but I doubt it will ever be built.
i’m a bit surprised by how this discussion has gone… the website listed is for the wrong firm. http://www.rsvp-architects.com/ is the puerto rican firm that designed this. looking through their portfolio you will see some decent renders and a few more in this debatable style. this is very old (2003), unpublished work by them, btw… maybe they had an intern who sucked back then? maybe they sucked at the computer then? dunno… some of their more recent work seems much better imo. though they are really obsessed with that wrapping concrete ribbon thing.
mart:
Thank you for the information. It seems all of this, and my comments included, are the result of a big misunderstanding. The link in the Archdaily headline as you all can see takes you to the NY office, to which I extend my sincere apologies. After a more careful research everybody can see that this house belongs to another studio named just exactly, to which I also extend my apologies to some extent because the house and its representation, I think, still doesn’t resist a serious observation, hence the first ironic review.
Clearly, Archdaily messed up, which is OK, but, it has made me look like a fool. The least would be an erratum as well as an apology to whomever they think, not to mention a more careful handling of the info next time.
Juan del pueblo:
Gracias por su aclaración semántica, ha sido muy bien recibida. Razón tiene que al jugar con nacionalismos se pierde valor en el mensaje cualquiera que sea, pero cierto es que hay que tomarse las cosas más a la ligera, por ejemplo, nadie se cree en serio que cuando Los Simpson van a Brazil el país es así, sin embargo el gobierno de ese entonces demandó a la cadena Fox. Lo que quiero decir es que lejos de hacer precisiones, presenté mis observaciones dentro de un tono bromista, o impreciso si prefiere, con la verdad a medias pero jamás beligerante.
My mom has “good concepts” every other day, but that doesn’t make her into an architect. Actually, most 1st year architecture students have great concepts, but only a few go on to materialize those concepts into good architecture. Clients sometimes also have “good concepts”, and they go an architect to help them define said concept or translate it into architecture. Someone wrote “Concept: 10″, how so? A house partly made of steel on a poured-in-place, huge concrete base, to be built on a small Caribbean. Let’s see, is there a local concrete plant on the island, not to even consider that steel part, which I’m assuming would be some high grade stainless or titanium as to be able to resist the severe rusting tendency of anything metallic placed next to the water. Finally, why would anyone want to have any solid walls that block the prime view of the pool projecting over the sea? I’m mean, this is a beach house, right? It definitely looks like a bad Denari knockoff [not that Debari is much better anyway]. If this guy is the dean of the school, god have mercy on his poor students. What is he teaching you, how to poorly render crappy architecture? Listen, my old roommate in architecture school was Puerto Rican, and he was an awesome designer, so hopefully this guy is not misrepresenting anyone. Adios
too much comment… i think this is not because of the architectural design but with the interesting presentation. I don’t understand the man leaning upsidedown on the wall. crazy?
the renders are from 2007…. give it a break
Can´t believe AD readers, mostly architects, students and architecture admirers, are criticizing renders…Come on…
Nice for a comicdaily site, not for an arch… please save Culebra from this!
Ouch!
the paco’s student is Fuster???