Bastard Design

This house, located in the Central Valley of Chile —at 5 minutes form the city—, is like a statement, as the design and building process were so unsteady, starting with the site —in a very steeped hill— to the budget limitations.

The main façade is the roof, designed as a terrace with a 360º view upon the valley; a structural complement underneath the deck that overtakes the horizontal forces in case of earthquakes. This wooden ‘envelop’ is extended and returned to block excessive sun exposure in the hot summer, but allowing the sun enter in the winter.

The spatial organization is an open space around the patio with the kitchen. It can be displayed as the user wishes, switching dinning room to living room, etc. The whole program fits in 103 m2. All spaces (interior and exterior) are inter-connected, in a continuous promenade with no dead ends.

The modus operandi was through trial and error, whereas all design resources at reach where unconsciously or more rationally implied: from Corbusier’s ‘5 points for a new modern architecture’, to nearby Smijan Radic’s Copper House 2, through Mies structural explicitness, OMA and PLOT experiments. The result is a very basic grid configuration that evolved to a multifaceted formal result; a bastardized design, like a crossbreed dog, as named in Chilean: A Kiltro (by chance, also the title of the first martial arts film entirely shooted in Chile, in 2006).

Supersudaka is the Chilean base of the international interdisciplinary group Supersudaca. The office was created by Juan Pablo Corvalan (architect degree from L'Ecole d'Ingénieurs de Genève, 1996, and Master degree at the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, 2002) and Gabriel Vergara (architect from the Universidad de Talca, 2006).