FIVE HOUSES IN FIVE NATURAL PARKS IN PATAGONIA
ARCHETYPE, FOUND FORM
In the wilderness, we are confronted with the sublime—This project introduces five houses in remote locations along the Chilean National Park system to investigate how to live together in nature. Through rigorous exploration of form and order, the houses deploy a variety of spatial propositions to intertwine degrees of both seclusion and engagement with the landscape. Once unapologetically autonomous, non-referential and quasi-found objects, each house is distinctly human and specific to its natural location. Project in collaboration with architect William Smith.
In the wilderness, we are confronted with the sublime. We are compelled to inhabit the wild landscape intimately yet are simultaneously terrified of its indifference and inherent danger. In this paradoxical moment we seek a dual quality: an assurance of our survival intertwined with the promise of continually re-discovering the wild further.
The duality of this sublime experience is manifested as a dual architecture. For a series of houses in the wilderness, we position the architectural object to declare itself to the subject as an assurance. Then from its discovered geometries, the object both subverts itself, and the relation between subject and landscape.
Sequentially across the houses, we expand this duality further along a gradient of modes of living: changing from internalized experiences, within seemingly absolute architectures of an almost urban presence at one extreme, towards externalized modes of living, within more ambiguous objects spread into the landscape at the other.
TOWER HOUSE
LAUCA NATIONAL PARK
The house is located in a high plane of shallow topography. It is in this flat plane where the Tower rises: a man-made object measuring the vastness around it, oriented to the North, pointing towards the Parinacota Volcano. The Tower is placed far from anything. As a faint orthogonal road approaches the Tower, it becomes a circular drive revealing shifting perceptual qualities. The tower is simple in its external form and yet intricate and spatially rich in its interior. The aggregation of figures results in an object that is both rounded and faceted. Stacked inside are tight, tall canyons of stairs, large enough they could capture the landscape outside - a portion of its vastness tilted vertically in every direction. The stair circumscribes rooms, never cutting through them so as to provide privacy. The tower is familiar in its urban resemblance yet archaic and monumental. It insinuates scale but does not explain itself. Are we far away? Or close? In the same way that the monotonous grid of windows disguises the spatial complexity hidden inside, from the outside, windows could be abnormally small, or normal, yet still far away. The windows are to the object what this stoic tower is to the landscape.
BLOCK HOUSE
NAHUELBUTA NATIONAL PARK
The house is located in a rough, sloping landscape with vertical lines of tree trunks striking against the steep hillside that visitors walk upon. The house subverts visual expectation with a stark perpendicular form cutting across the bright trees, dark against the dense horizon. The visitors experience the house as a massive wall, soaring at one end towards the valley and tiny -almost disappearing- on the other end as it embeds in the earth. Cellular windows indicate an assured internal logic but do not communicate the depth of the object. Entering the house from above, the pair discover the contrasting shallowness of its plan and depth of its section. Inhabitation splits from the entry into two modes of living: one which travels high to the horizon through an enfilade of rooms for domestic activities. The other goes down with the topography to earthen spaces of work, effort and focus. Living, working and dreaming, the monastic routine of the couple unfolds as the sun rises and sets every day. Oriented perfectly north-south, living in this narrow, deep and elongated structure, always pierced by sunlight is to inhabit the forest sometimes high in the foliage sometimes down in its roots.
DICE HOUSE
CHILOE NATIONAL PARK
The pair visiting the house approaches through the forest, opposite the arc of the northern sun towards a meadow. Yet as the pair discovers the front of the house is not an entry, they walk around to its other side and understand its secret. It is almost two houses, formed from the subtraction of geometries from the initial object they perceived. As they enter, the visitors find a pair of generous double and triple height spaces for living, or working. These spaces meet at the edge of the subtracted triangle. It is in this shared space qualified by the presence of the triangular blade, where one can perceive diagonally the entire depth of the dice, its dual structure and its position within the meadow. Here, a single stair moves up, later splitting into two equivalent circulations. The couple’s paths separate, winding through stacked duplicate rooms for study and sleep until re-uniting at the roof above. The house presents itself utterly abstract, an unconcerned object. It reads as a flat, mute square against the imposing forest held behind it. Within the parallel wings of the house, the visitors live functionally separate but visually connected, allowing an ongoing voyeuristic communication between the pair.
STRIP HOUSE
LOS FLAMENCOS NATIONAL RESERVE
In the vast desert, a little house hides. Across soft valleys of sand, sudden outcroppings of jutting rock formations create moments of shadow. Within one of these formations the house sits as an object locked into the cliffs above the valley below. On approach, the house, a slab resting on sand, reads inert, yet a single window indicates inhabitation, but the path avoids it and slips between the side of the house and nearby cliffs, the house and rock almost touching. On the alternate face of the house, a potential energy seems released, the object pulled as if attracted to the rock faces for closer inspection. Two wings of the house rotate around a central void space and stretch towards the rocks, further intensifying the confrontation between object and landscape. Atelier spaces with bedrooms above compress double height interiors, a series of rooms not internally accessible to each other but the exterior. Living within this house requires stepping out and confronting the valley below. It is only through a compressed slot of space behind the void that one can barely see through to the opposite wing of the house.
PLATE HOUSE
LAS PALMAS DE COCALAN PARK
Trekking along steep ridgelines, visitors find a circular form tethered to palm trees below. Stepping down the hills towards the perimeter wall they are barely able to see above it the small structure held within a circular courtyard. The circle sits low within the hill, spread wide across the viewer’s horizon. From a cut that signals the entrance through the bare wall, the house is perceived hardly as house and more a courtyard with a small enclosed space. Yet the idea of a single room is challenged, perhaps the courtyard is the actual room to live in. The house provides a minimal amount of contained space and the greatest degree of engagement with nature. While a hidden bedroom sits outside the courtyard, there is no door. While there is a place to bathe, it has no barrier. Working, dwelling, thinking, all must happen in the open without seclusion. This delicate intimacy anticipates the sense of vulnerability embedded in this house. It is fragile, elusive and unknown. It is not a house. Its geometries do not remind us of a place we have been in the same way in which living there is not how we have lived before.
LOCATION
Patagonia, Chile
PROGRAM
Private house
Date
2018
TEAM
Francisco Ramos, William Smith