CASA 34

This is a country house located in a prairiealong a gentle slope, facing an inlet at the west shore of the lake Rupanco, Chile, around 900 km south from Santiago.It has five guest bedrooms, each of them with its own bathroom, a main bedroom, a spacious living and dining room, a kitchen, a service room, and a garage. All these rooms are placed in a long pavilion facing the lake. They are connected at the rear bya roofed gallery open to an interior patio. The pavilion has an exposed regular structure made of laminated wood beams coated in black. The structure consists of 2 rows of square pillars with a footprint of19 x 19 cm. They are set in a distance of 370cm supporting a master beam of 19 x 34 cm, built without dowels. On top of them sits a group of secondary beams of 9 x 34 cm,each arranged in a distance of 78 cm supportinga flat roof planted with the same grass of the prairie. The concrete chimney of the living room together with the series of partition walls between the bedrooms brace the wood arcades from the horizontal loads. The ceiling made of native wood is nailed to the secondary beams. Together with the wooden sheets of the roof, it forms a rigid plane. All the partition walls have a double row of metal studs covered by plaster sheets or native wood. The interior pavements are made of the same wood, stacked on the slab. The retaining walls of the patio, of the pavilion’s basement as well as of the terrace in front, are made of masonry with local stones. The curved wall surrounding the patio follows the contour line of the prairie. The house findsits own place within the landscape while remaining part of it.