Jacarandá House | Estudio Galera

It is set in an atypical corner lot on the verge of two zonings –multifamily/single-family dwelling- as it presents the size of a hotel but the space treatment and internal scale of a house. The residence works as a transitional nexus between different scales, typologies and area uses.

 Rigid constraints such as setback regulations in the building code, landscape laws that determine the amount of trees that can be cut down and the lot topography intersect in a program of flexible and always increasing needs. A game of boxes is devised as a project strategy since it allows for grouping, stacking and skewing; boxes that can grow, shorten, expand or comprise depending on the need. At the time of projecting, this exercise generates great flexibility and ensures versatility on the project proposal.    

 The dwelling develops on three levels and the structural logic is inverted due to the needs of the program, stacking the boxes, from the smallest one which is buried to the largest ones on top.  The boxes rest and hang in a structural game of gantries, tensioners and vierendeel beams –an apparently simple structural proposal.

Contrasting with the connection to the street, the strategy in the interior is of a full opening, both in the treatment of the shape and in the space delimitation. Two big built wings preserve the patio, while ample glass panels hidden in the partitions generate continuity between the public areas of the house and the barbecue grill, swimming pool and solarium areas. This, in turn, creates a home environment in a house built a hundred meters from downtown beaches.

 The skewed volumes give scale to circulations and patios that circumvent and guard the existing pines. The swimming pool, which is reached by the sunlight to the west, stands as an appendix to the house.

 The windows, curved as hollows in the walls, conceal the interior while turning the landscape into framed pictures when seen from the inside. The perimeter becomes a hollow eighty centimetre concrete mass.

 The exposed concrete is the sole material of this project and it is worked with different formwork. A material that never ages and which does not require great maintenance since it looks as it is from the very beginning: without coating or ornaments, simple and imperfect.