Thus, this slab becomes a mirror that reflects the upper section of the tower, the sky, and the surrounding trees; but it also transfigures into a fictitious glass, into a transparency, suggesting the presence of the lower tower.

And even more difficult: like a permanent cloud, the slab casts a dense and compact shadow over the lower tower, and even sometimes the rain falls all around the perimeter due to the overflow of the small pond.

Paradoxically, the function of the viewpoint is reversed inside the tower. Instead of framing the sublime panorama, perhaps tempering an imposing presence, access to the suspended platform occurs through a spiral staircase that revolves around a continuous mural of vines, both live and painted, depicting a selection of thirty interconnected native flowers on the same tree.

After the platform, a feeble wooden ladder allows climbing up to a dark room with four peepholes, a sort of intricate camera obscura, which in turn serves as a passage to an open, overexposed roof, with a hearth that, at the proper distance, could turn the entire tower into an antiquated chimney.

Text provided by the architects.

The name of this intricate structure is given by the size of that bigger courtyard, which is equivalent to the size of a bullring (called medialuna in Chilean rural tradition).

The spatial quality of every room, both interior and exterior, is punctuated by singular openings in multiple directions, thus establishing a faint functional division: there is almost no contrast between those rooms for living and those for working (from painting to gardening). In some corners, there are accents of intimacy, while in others the weight, emptiness, and opacity become somewhat monumental.

The extended format of the system makes the horizontal flatness of the roof evident, although with an almost imperceptible transition from one to two floors. Its fortress-like presence, despite the exaggerated lack of thickness of its concrete walls, is divided by horizontal strata of regular cornices. In opposition to those rough surfaces, the patio walls are crowned by bold eaves, some of them rounded, some of them straight.

Text provided by the architect.

The building recognizes the need to polarize the time of innovation in at least two moments: in a creative experience based on a social, collective and integrated environment and in another rather intimate, solitary and individual experience. The spatial structure of the building is based on these two clearly differentiated conditions. On the one hand, an open center that establishes a series of vertically interconnected halls, with a circular void that reduces in size as it rises. On the other hand, some private work spaces that occupy the corners of each floor, in a quarter-circle figure whose center pivots around each edge, growing inversely proportional to the central voids.

Instead of the traditional system of pillars in an undifferentiated grid without hierarchies, this office floor is at the same time a specific space for exhibitions, workshops and meetings controlled visually and acoustically, through the curved walls that function as opaque screens. The diversity and character of the resulting space somehow promotes the dynamics of work without categories (or with ever-changing positions) between teachers, students, researchers, entrepreneurs and local communities.

Text provided by the architect.