2 Houses in Lake Ranco

by X Sáez Joannon Arquitectos

© Sáez Joannon Architects

© Sáez Joannon Architects

Architects: Sáez - Joannon Arquitectos Asociados
Collaborator: Andrés Altamirano A.
工
Site Area 288.1 m2
Structural Engineering: C.L. Ingenieros Consultores (Demetrio Concha)
Location: Coique, Lago Ranco, X Región
Project Year: 2007

These two houses should be understood as a unit even though they were two different commissions with one year passing between the first one and the second one. The site was divided among four brothers in four narrow and very long fields that shaped a 150 meters-long edge along the lake’s shore.

The Tagle House, the first one to be built, presented us with the problem of having to pick one of the four available sites. The main feature of the original-undivided site was a forest of tall poplars with thick black trunks and translucent foliage, irregularly planted away from the lakeshore. These trees formed a place with clear boundaries where one could escape the surroundings, a place in itself that someone could enter or leave. We decided to layout the house within this area, although slightly displaced towards the front, maintaining some of the trees inside the house creating the uncertainty of what came first, the forest or the house.

The house’s longest side faces north, gaining the best solar orientation for the bedrooms and public rooms. The main outdoors place, the terrace, takes over the site’s front, shaping the nearby garden and becoming the principal space in this summer dwelling. The house is defined as a hermetic longitudinal bar that takes over the whole length of the site opening out only to specific views or entrances, generating internal distances through transparent alleys in order to achieve the separation, requested by the client, between the children’s area and the lounge.

The second dwelling, the Küpfer House, would occupy the site between the Tagle House and the next site, one with much less vegetation, except for a heap of native trees placed on the lakeshore. Considering the narrowness of the sites, when testing possible locations to maintain the privacy between both houses the best decision was not to put them next to the other. If the Tagle House was already taking possession of and protecting itself in the site, then the Küpfer House needed to create a private place for its dwellers. Hence, the best choice was to place it next to the edge, almost above the water by taking advantage of an existent unevenness on the ground that would allow us to submerge and hide a ground floor. The house is proposed as a bar parallel to the shore, generating its own boundaries in this undivided site and placed between the wall of trees in the front and an artificial one formed by a multiple-use patio.

In both cases, the decision of incorporating patios able to provide the houses with transparency and to fuse them with surrounding trees has the same motivation: to achieve a Chilean southern style of life, different to the families’ all-year-round urban life, and able to intensify the experience of the landscape. In terms of building materials, both houses were worked with the idea of the lightness of a main volume sat on pillars, detached from the ground, and built upon a combined structure of pine wood and metal structures covered by a planking of fibrocement painted in graphite gray. While in the Tagle House we used concrete pillars, in the Küpfer House we replaced them with big ones veneered with grey slate from Maicolpué that become the inhabitable rooms of the ground floor.