2014 MCHAP
Los Quenes House
Emilio Marin & Juan Carlos Lopez
Los Quenes, Chile
Dec-12
PRIMARY AUTHOR
Emilio Marin & Juan Carlos Lopez Searle Puga Arquitectos
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
CLIENT
Soames Flowerree
PHOTOGRAPHER
Juan Carlos Lopez
OBJECTIVE
The spatial cross that divides and splits the public from the private, creates a frame that contains landscape and, at the same time, the micro cosmos of the bedrooms. The interior landscape of the house blends with the mountains and vegetation. Nature, architecture and objects, different scales and components of the same reality, are mixed and integrated through the project.
CONTEXT
Located in a longitudinal valley, from North to South, the house sits where nature still appears in the wild, close to an active volcano on the outskirts, a vast forest and a river that flows with pure water from the Cordillera de los Andes. The valley is made of mountains and forests, topography and nature. From a certain distance it seems uninhabited but approaching some isolated houses, it appears that, hidden in the foilage and among the hills, life has developed within construction of small enclosed spaces. The Los Queñes House is a built manifesto of this heroic condition of inhabiting such remote landscape as the Andes, a fact that brings us back to that primitive state when the house was rather a shelter.
PERFORMANCE
The house appears to be a hard and closed volume, whose shape is given by the course of rainwater. From the inside, this same shape is transformed into a totally different contextual volume, an open space oriented by the four cardinal points. This large domestic space, dedicated to public use, has different programs: kitchen, living room, a small coffee table and some armchairs. It is a flexible place where life flows, less defined and yet very precise in its function given by the variable position of the owner´s furnitures.
