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Architects: Arce&Westermeier
- Area: 45 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Nicolas Saieh, Felipe Westermeier
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Manufacturers: Cintac, Gyplac, Imperial
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Lead Architects: Felipe Arce, Felipe Westermeier
Text description provided by the architects. The project is located in the northern sector of the commune of Valdivia, Los Rios Region (Chile), immersed in an evergreen vegetation that together with a strong rainy climate characterizes the so-called Valdivian Rainforest. The commission originally consisted of a small shelter of 45 square meters, adjacent to the main house of the property.
The volume is specifically inserted in a sloping area within the property, gaining a height through piles that seek panoramic views of the area, specifically towards the west, where the Calle-Calle River is located. The project materializes this search through a completely glazed face, this visual escape is built through a curtain wall of almost six meters long, thus achieving an accentuated friction between the domestic interior and the wild exterior.
From the outside, the resulting faces are solid, mono-material, and dark, containing small indispensable openings (as in the kitchen and bathroom) but continuing to propose a mostly hermetic volumetry. The sloping roof provides a good reaction to heavy local rainfall and also generates a height of five meters on the east façade, suggesting the existence of an intermediate level space, a space in height that is part of the origin of the project; the mezzanine.
The proposal develops the habitat as the main architectural model, however, the assignment posed a need not always involved in this typology; an intermediate privacy space where a second intermittent user will be incorporated. Therefore, the question was posed: How can a semi-private space be incorporated into a fundamentally mono-private space, as is the habitat model? The answer brought a space in height to the interior of the house, a mezzanine that in addition to meeting the need raised, could function as a storage space, decorative qualities, or simply as a living room.
This intermediate space invited us to conceptualize a programmatic battery in its lower part, this battery combined and synthesized the most private uses of domesticity; the bathroom, a walking closet, the entrance hall, and an area with kitchen appliances, freeing all the rest for a large continuous open floor plan. The resulting mezzanine functions as a living space of 1.4 meters in height (on a slope), its relative lack of definition allows for a wide range of possibilities of use, which is accessed from a cat staircase right in the access cubicle, which is also part of the battery of programs. Finally, two open spaces are achieved with a graduated privacy ratio, a sort of large habitable step with two levels that point to the main visual leakage of the volume.
