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Architects: Germán del Sol, José Cruz
- Area: 5600 m²
- Year: 1995
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Manufacturers: Nuprotec, Procobre, Tradema
Text description provided by the architects. The purpose of the Hotel is to create a place that will promote the exploration of the natural and cultural environment of remote regions, at the southern tip of America.
It is located at the Torres del Paine National Park, a 500,000 acres wilderness limiting with the southern ice fields, in Chile's west Patagonia.
The architecture of the hotel is based on the following ideas:
To establish a link between the city and nature, it must mediate between the calculated reality of cities, and the unexpected behaviour of nature. A civilised interior, in the midst of nature´s imposing presence.
The building is established in the natural environment, as if withdrawing from it, to allow the appearance of the remote. It reaffirms the untouched. Like the sand that emerges with the ride of the tide, the momentum of architecture is delayed, not to captured at the first sight.
Architecture, which endures, must create a relationship with the ephemeral nature of a trip, that penetrates into the remote, and restores one smoothly to the origins.
This relationship occurs in the interior of the hotel, that offers many places for visitors to make a pause in their endless journeys. One is invited to make a pause and remain inside, by endless variations of light and sight.
A sheltering interior, with subtracted dimensions.
An economy of forms, to strengthen the main form.
And, nonetheless, an architecture impossible to understand at the first sight.
