[ Felipe Assadi ] 20X20 HOUSE

The task was the construction of a guests  house and a house of games to give support to the main house located in Calera de Tango.   The programme requested to have two bedrooms each one with bathroom, one kitchen / bar and a visits bathroom, plus a living area that should include a pool table and a games table.  The house should have a maximum area of 100 square metres

The land, a 4.5 hectares tenement, serves to grow fruits where its irrigation arrangement, by means of transversal channels, turns it into a highly floodable area. For this reason, this condition was beneficial to raise the house over piles at 80 cm height over the natural land, decision that adjusts to the main house (which was also raised for the same reasons).

The request was to have a house requiring minimum maintenance measures.  The materials trend was to belong to the products category, should even be washables.  Both land and climate should not degrade finishing.   An additional request was to have a project that would be part of the landscape, without really affecting the view from the main house towards the plantations.  That is why the option was a glass volume through which it was possible to follow the trees, while the house was not in use.  For the remaining walls, the choice was a black colour that is easily absorbed within its context.  So nature and time were left in charge of limiting the space contained by this crystal box.

The process continued by choosing the siding:  20 x 20 ceramic.  This choice placed three restrictions:  First, the complete house had to be divided into 20 cm. perfect modules.  Secondly, all the precincts, windows, furniture, lighting, etc, would be referred to a 20 x 20 construction that would work as a master plan, both inside and outside the house.  Finally, the house should have a square ground plan. This later condition, because it deals with an exercise that partially operates under the concept of space diagramming and its aftermath the direct reference to the material proportions.

The time the project would be used, since it deals with a guests  house, practically limits to a couple of hours in the afternoon, of course during the night, and to some weekends when it is used as barbecue.  For this reason,  the  dormitories were  arranged towards  east,  so the guests - Swedish relatives of the owners - could see the Andes Mountain range in the dawn, time of the day when it is visible during most of the year�s days in this zone.  At the centre was placed the games room and to the west, protected by a one-metre thick blind wall, the outdoors dining room, in a yard that crosses the full volume from South to North, direction of the predominant winds that air the house in summer.  Due to the lack of area, the kitchen, bar and visits bathroom were arranged in a core that forms a wall -furniture that additionally splits the dormitories from the living room.

from  felipeassadi