Concept

This project starts with the idea of a tent. My friend Rene Reyes told me that he just had bought a site in the forests near Santiago, Chile. As it offers a agreeable climate and strong landscape, he intended to spend some weekends there, living in his tent.
Finally, we got the idea to design a rather personal and small, almost temporal architecture, which would behave like a tent, but certainly would be more comfortable and estable, colonizing the site, like a first step to inhabit the forest.
Because the extra small budget we built the house completly by using materials from a Homecenter Store, in fact a cataloge supermarket where everybody can buy goods of daily use. Also we didnt used the help of any construction company or specialized workers. The difficult terrain allowed only a small constructable area which maximum space we tried to use.
The buliding contains only one room of 40 sqm, which gives a view to the valley troughout a 8m wide window and, for the second floor, the roof became an overexposed exterior space, floating over the forest.
The whole project is generated by a white band, which moves continuosly around the buliding and is folded several times. Also, this element acts as some kind of furniture at apecial points.
The monochrome condition of the building is strongly contrasting the landscape and draws a radical sign from the distance, like an abstraction of the human being.

Abel Erazo Mora, Architect U. Of Chile, Master Researcher, Ishiyama Laboratory, Waseda University