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Architects: Alejandro Soffia
- Area: 100 m²
- Year: 2019
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Photographs:Juan Durán Sierralta, Mathias Jacobs
Text description provided by the architects. Human population is increasing by almost 2% a year. The need for shelter to develop our daily activities ends in a built environment. This must give good living conditions, like comfortable space, natural light, acoustics, etc. But the built environment also starts a dialogue with the preceding one, the natural environment, which must be sustainable.
So in my point of view, Architecture faces two main human challenges. First, decreasing its impact over nature’s equilibrium, and second, building many square meters of good quality for an actual and coming population. I am right now as an Architect, in this second challenge, trying to develop prefab systems with good (true/beauty) design.
That’s why I selected Prefabrication as a strategy for building my projects, but also during the design process too. The hypothesis is, that if you create a prefabricated system which has a good architectural design, then you can reproduce this quality as much as you need it, within the laws of short/long production series. And if in the serial industrial production of buildings you get bored, you can also customize form and function through the system. More benefits when you fasten the building process and have more control over quality and cost.
Yellow is the third name of this house. First, it was Silvered House, because of the color of the surrounding trees by winter. Then it was Desafasada1 House name, that’s related to the planes of the volumetrical composition of the project. But when the house got to yellow, on the decision about external covering, the color was too powerful to conquer the final name of the house.
In this project, the prefabricated system is not only used in the construction aspect of the house, but also in the way the house is designed. So at the beginning, I choose a slab panel, as the dimensional unit in the plan. This panel can be 122 x 244 cm (4x8 feet), 122 x 366 cm or 122 x 488 cm.
Then I transform that slabs to a volume by adding modular walls (244 cm tall) and roof. The result I’ve called it spatial module that is a space defined by two walls and two slabs. Afterward, I adjust room dimension needs, to what’s similar in SlP spatial modules, so the multiplication of these modules creates each room or programmatic modules. At the end of the conceptual design, I order all the programmatic modules by some layout, and there’s a resulting space and form.
