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Architects: Rubén Muñoz
- Area: 186 m²
- Year: 2021
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Manufacturers: Quimica Universal
"For our grandparents a tower, a dwelling, a fountain, even their own clothing, their mantle, were still infinitely familiar; each thing was an ark in which they found humanity and added their own human heritage. For us, there is emptiness instad, indifferent things rush in, appearances of things, traps of life, they have nothing in common with the abode, the fruit, the cluster into which the hope and meditation of our grandparents had penetrated. Things endowed with life, things lived, the things admitted to our confidence, are in their decline and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last ones who knew such things. The responsibility of preserving not only their memory, but their human and lyrical value rests on us." Rainer Maria Rilke.
This house just wants to be a house and nothing more. It would like to go unnoticed, starting from scratch, approaching the anonymous wooden constructions of southern Chile, towards "an architecture of humility". This house only tries one thing, to reconstruct the imaginaries of the memory of its inhabitants: a granary where childhood time passed unhurriedly; a blighted wooden awning; a place to enjoy the passing of the seasons; an attempt to approximate nature and artifice, almost in an incestuous way, as in the work of Arnold Böcklin.
It will be a refuge that transforms the natural landscape into an interior landscape. Not only as a measured and bounded cutout, but also as a skylight and as a small patio where the rain will fall. Its limits will be a corridor open to a gentle hill that descends into a plain, towards a small untamed forest, and an interior gallery with overhead light, which will serve as an exhibition hall for works of art.
The project proposes a contemporary response to housing in a semi-rural context, leaving the smallest ecological footprint with its construction process. The natural state of the landscape is preserved, avoiding intervening in the topography and preserving the native vegetation. Sustainability criteria that tend to individual and community autonomy are applied. Drinking water is collected from springs in the sector, treated collectively. Sewage systems are autonomous. Electric power will be produced by solar panels.
Built by a local carpenter, this austere construction is structured by carpentry and pine wood trusses. As a bioclimatic strategy, together with protection by means of a corridor to the north, both from the copious local rains and from the direct sun, passive ventilation was contemplated, as well as a perimeter ventilated partition, with white wood cladding on the inside and carbolineum treated wood on the outside. Inside, the variations in natural light will be reflected in the pine boards of its white-stained vertical decking, valuing the gestures and everyday objects of domestic life. Outside, the boards will be stacked horizontally, their wood will be black, worn, old.
