House 2 / Eduardo Berlin Razmilic

Architect: Eduardo Berlin Razmilic
Location: Las Condes, Santiago, Chile
Client: Withheld
Technical Advisors: Eduardo Valenzuela, Gonzalo Santolaya, Juan Grimm
Site Area: 1.600 sqm
Constructed Area: 600 sqm + terraces
Project year: 2005
Construction year: 2006 – 2008
Main Materials: Nude Concrete, Stone & Glass
Photographs: Sebastián Sepúlveda & Eduardo Berlin

Through an unconventional implantation, House 2 articulates the house’s every-day program in a single level. Opposing the site’s natural slope, the house and garden develop 3,5 meters above street level, via an elemental ground operation that transforms the preexistent rise in two main horizontal plans, above and below. Both realms are gradually articulated by architectural operations.

More than a parking lot, the 500 square meter court, porous and transparent, amounts to an access plaza, carefully designed and partially sheltered by the second’s level large volume. This liberated place directs the observer toward the Central Patio, open at the center of the second level volume, and manifest in the plaza by a rectangular water tank. This Patio not only articulates the houses three stories, but also generates it’s entrance through the staircase.

The program’s proposition is clear and simple: one walkway circumscribed to the Patio, and articulated by the family room, meeting place by definition and reinforced by this duality of passing versus staying.

As in a screenplay, this circulation tells the story of the program in absolute equal terms: bedrooms, living room, kitchen, terrace, etc., create all possible programmatic relations without interference. Thus the house scale is preserved in a rectangular single story program holding over 500 square meters, with large spaces, with control levels common to compact projects, but autonomies common to disaggregated plans.

The third level holds a den and a large open terrace that dominates the Andes views and the abundant vegetation. This roof terrace relates to the lower level through circular perforations in the floor/ceiling contributing light but also showing each other reciprocally thus anticipating the whole through allusive fragments that allow our minds to reconstruct it.

By this unusual implantation, House Two relates and governs over three grand exterior spaces (plaza, garden, and roof terrace) allowing exteriors for an area equivalent to the original empty site’s of 1,600 square meters.

In a minor scale, the house presents itself with simple Cartesian lines, net spaces, and rigorous studies on perforation of vertical planes. Most details lie in the very essence of the nude concrete applications, reflecting particular emphasis in material junctions and encounters in order to maintain elements at a minimum.