The project involved transforming a 1935 house, featuring a continuous façade and two stories designed by architect Fernando Calvo Larraín, into a set of three independent units: two small apartments and one house with garden access.

Taking advantage of the original structure—composed of simple masonry walls—the floor plan was divided into two halves, placing the main unit to the north and the two apartments to the south. In this way, the smaller apartments share a common entrance through the front garden, while the main unit has its own entrance and direct access to the northern garden.

With this new configuration, it was necessary to replace the spaces lost by the main unit. To achieve this, a new steel and glass pavilion was built to restore the kitchen and staircase area. This redesign redefines the relationship between the interior and the garden and becomes the main space of the new home.

Text provided by the architects.

La entrada Three housing units se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The project for this experimental arts hall proposes an emptying operation, in which the same municipal regulations that halted the building’s renovation and brought on its current disrepair are used to our advantage. The façade is the only structure that remained partially intact after the fire in 2006 and the earthquake in 2010. These disasters opened up the interior and forever erased the remains of eight houses that had occupied the site.

The project totally empties the property, reproducing the original façade until it is complete in every detail, making it a sort of friendly disguise. The city can be seen from inside through the gaps, forming part of the backdrop for some of the events. Few structural elements touch the ground on the first floor: the lift, a staircase and the support wall for mobile tiers.

La entrada NAVE se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The hatch house is located in an ecological reserve that stands out for its important floristic convergence with the forest and sclerophyllous scrub, in addition to the imposing Chilean palms. In an abrupt location, between the valley and the coastal mountain range, a hermetic and introspective volume sits on the edge of a ravine that faces the El Roble hill. The condition of a natural viewpoint towards the valley of flowers and the sunsets of multicolored rocky peaks transforms the house into a ship that is about to take flight.

The house is planned as a container of programs structured around a central space that houses the common areas (living room, dining room and kitchen) with an east-west orientation. The perimeter furniture made of structural plywood made on site is in turn an equipped partition that houses the shelves, libraries, kitchen and closets. Behind them the four pieces are organized. In the core is the “hatch” that leads to the viewing terrace. With this configuration, a plan with a fluid and unitary spatiality is obtained, generating a garden towards the mountain as a viewing terrace towards the valley.

La entrada Hatch House se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Just a seven-minute walk from the center of Temuco you reach the main entrance to Cerro Ñielol on Prat Street. This axis links the foot of the hill and the other edge of the city, the Cautín River. In Chile there are only seventeen declared natural monuments and one of them is Cerro Ñielol. As Cerro Ñielol rises, it subtly departs along a winding path that follows the contour lines of the existing topography. This path formed by the density of shadow of the foliage of native trees is suddenly illuminated by rays of light, leaving the inhabitant foreshortened with windows of landscapes that look at the city of Temuco.

Reaching its summit at elevation 230, above sea level, the architectural procession is established by a staircase that gives the measure and distance to reach the large terrace, a horizontal one on a summit. By having a horizontal on a summit it becomes an architectural fact and the gaze is elevated over the domain of the territory, giving the size, scale and magnitude of the city’s valley, configuring its identity. The morphology of this valley is established, where the void is measured by the Conunhueno hill that faces the Ñielol hill, and in its lower part, like a diagonal avenue of water, you can glimpse the Cautín River. So how can we build an architectural work to inhabit the act of rising in an aerial profile and that manages to frame the landscape of this territory?

Returning to an identity typical of the ancient habitation of Temuco, the old houses had a Zaguán; a double door before entering the privacy of the home. This small backlit place left a door with cathedral glass; a veil of light that allowed a glimpse without discovering an interior. Therefore, when walking from the street, the step was shortened by glimpsing a silhouette of an interior. This observation of the ancient habitation of Temuco was what we wanted to rescue.

La entrada Cerro Ñielol Viewpoint se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Single-family home located in the Frutillar commune, X Region, in the rural sector of Bahía Domeyko, located in front of Lake Llanquihue on the southern slope of the bay. These two characteristics of the context define the layout of the rooms and the staggered shape of the house. Given the need to have the most public venues with a frontal view of the lake, the main spaces are arranged on the front.

Likewise, the staggered strategy responds to the topography of the hillside with a volume that descends diagonally to the terrain, maximizing the capture of northern sun to counteract the few hours of the location with views to the south. These levels are descending from the most private to the most public.

The first three are only separated by half levels, leaving the master bedroom in the first, children’s bedrooms and study room in the second. Kitchen, loggia, dining room and living room on the third, as the most public level, which opens completely to the lake, leaving the fourth for storage, parking and main access.

La entrada Quebrada Honda House se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

This is a large and small building at the foot of the Andes mountains. In fact, it is an aggregate of twelve different buildings separated from each other by visible seismic joints. Saying that this collection of concrete blocks is a house would be too simple. Saying that it is a palace would be too humble. Beyond its secular kind, this group of buildings is rather a cloister.

It has a severe outline, (once more) a square footprint divided by an asymmetrical cross, with rooms at the perimeter and at its core. These rooms form a horizontal extension around four distinct courtyards: an elongated one following the natural terrain together with the sunrise and sunset; another long one totally flat and paved facing north; a non-directional one filled with a circular flower garden; and one more thrice its size that holds a pond and some old trees.

La entrada Luna House se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The painter’s studio has been erected to one side of a house in Bahía Azul. A small space, it appears to be a prolongation of the terrain when seen from the entrance, but from the slope it stands out as a piece embedded in the hillside.

The space, ultimately conceived as the prolongation of its own window frame, mediates between the sea and an interior garden located at the entrance. Reached by a narrow staircase, excavated out of the rock, it leaves the user in complete isolation.

It is a sort of retreat from the surrounding constructions, basically just a wall with indirect sunlight entering from above to paint by.

The rigidity and horizontality of the design reinforce the diagonal lines of the main house.

Text provided by the architect.

La entrada Painting studio se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Designed by the architect Ignacio Rojas Hirigoyen together with The Andes House, this project seeks to provide an affordable solution to the shortage of decent housing that affects Chile and Latin America, through a flexible modular construction system that is quickly and efficiently executed. With prefabricated parts that allow different configurations, the model can be expanded horizontally and vertically, accommodating other uses, and disassembled to be reused in a new location. This constructive solution includes recycled materials, taking advantage of their sincerity and aesthetic value in an austere architecture.

La entrada Industrialized Building System Prototype se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The construction appears leaning out on the seashore, like the stations on the shore of the train line to the north of Chile, where after having fallen into disuse only the solid has remained. Everything “perishable” has succumbed to looting and time. Containers emptied of everything, with their only rectangular perforations in the walls, distributed along an imaginary line.

The project was approached independently from the specific location and it was decided to break up the program separating bedrooms, dining room-kitchen and living room in order to ensure total independence between them. Monolithic reinforced concrete containers were designed with a perforation regime that ensured versatility of placement and association between the volumes, which were not pre-determined.

Text provided by the architect.

La entrada House in Bahía Azul se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Hualle House is a 230m2 family home located in the southern Araucania region of Chile, renowned for its natural beauty.

Place Response
The house sits on the central brow of the land, taking advantage of the aspect afforded on all sides by this elevated position. Approaching by road the house appears as a prominent simple black form on the hillside, reminiscent of large agricultural pitched-roof sheds found in the area.
Sitting on a gently sloping site in the rural foothills of the Villarrica volcano and the lake below, the house embraces this natural environment and the outstanding views afforded by its privileged setting. The two-storey building form and orientation is a response to this sloping terrain of the land and the microclimate of the area.

La entrada Hualle House se publicó primero en Global Spaces.