The project is developed in an 1100 m2 plot, located at the locality of La Calera. It is inserted on a hill that looks to a proper valley of the neighborhood, with a northwest orientation and a grade of 15 meters between the front and back.
The neighborhood is characterised by its steep slope. That’s why the first idea was to look for a strategy that allowed a flat space to place the house. This involved an apparently intelligent operation, which consisted in digging out the mountain at the back of the lot, and with that replenishing the front, acquiring the valued flat plane to hold up the architecture. This solution, used in most of the cases, generated on one hand, an important damage to the natural topography because of the excavation, and in the other hand, backyards that looked to a “bitten” mountain.
In discordance with the damage that caused this intervention, we appeal to Le Corbusier’s idea of lifting the whole volume across the topography, letting the mountain run beneath, obtaining the flat necessary space, artificially, through the performance of two slabs, “roof and floor”, both supported by concrete columns.
— Santiago Carlos Viale & Daniella Beviglia
Courtesy of archdaily.com
Photographs by Gonzalo Viramonte
