Holanda Townhouses | 57STUDIO

Over the last few years, the city of Santiago has been increasing its urban land value, creating the need to find new housing types with smaller footprint. This is how the so called "townhouse" or urban house arises. This typology allows to overcome the land scarcity by developing the projects with a vertical approach, providing each home with a small patio or garden and giving access to the rooftops.

Casa Holanda was conceived as a three-story residential building with a continuous facade towards the street, hosting 12 houses in a vertical format plus a duplex apartment located above the vehicular access. The vertical houses end with a rooftop terrace, which allows to observe over treetop level the surrounding landscape of the "El Aguilucho" neighborhood, a traditional area with low-rise houses located on the border between Providencia and Ñuñoa communes.

The project was conceived in reinforced concrete with an exposed finish and includes several steelwork details, where the stairs and railings stand out as key elements that provide continuity and identity to the vertical spaces, as well as giving rhythm and transparency to the side facades. Inversely, on the west oriented facade towards the street, smaller and alternate openings were arranged in order to break the disparity of the interior subdivisions and to achieve a unitary composition.

These openings contain a series of folding shutters made of corrugated and micro-perforated metal panels that act as a solar control and privacy barrier, while a ventilated facade of the same material is incorporated in front of the walls, changing its appearance into a completely homogeneous front when the shutters are closed.