Project: Orange Lemon House
Architects: Daniel Moreno Flores
Location: Quito, Ecuador
Area: 700 sf
Photographs by: Courtesy of Daniel Moreno Flores
The Orange Lemon House is a compact residence designed by Daniel Moreno Flores, a studio we’ve already referenced in our showcase of their Algarrobos House project in Puembo, Ecuador.
This home was designed and completed within just two months because its owners wanted to stop renting a place to live as fast as possible and instead use that money towards their own place. This 700 square feet solution is just perfect with modern living spaces and an amazing surrounding landscape.
A home destined to become quickly a definitive home because the owners were looking for a house that would allow them to leave the rental department soon and thus stop paying endless fees. The challenge was to design the project in a month and to build the house of 65m2 in two months. A house which had to be an affordable one, for this purpose blunt design strategies were defined: to create a structural constructive system that requires little time of execution and covers a large area.
Initially, the owners looked for a house of containers, nevertheless they required ample spaces, also had to cover them and modify them the reason why the sense of its reuse was lost. For that reason, a system of corrugated rod trusses that allows containing spaces was defined concretely and virtually, besides the importance of structuring with our own measures for different uses.
The foundation was built quickly with the leftovers from the rods and they were made as piles. The modulation of the house is a function of the material (the trusses are 7.2 meters long), so it is distributed every 1.20 m x 2.40 m in height to receive industrial plates and reduce execution costs. However, in such a fast process we leave space for the spontaneous and the definition in the work in progress.
With all those involved, multiple meetings were held that generated a sense of belonging, and in a process of maturation of the project it was decided to use pieces of Radiata Pinewood for the secondary structure; and the closings of the house that are placed inside the structure, in order to gain a comfortable feeling in the interior spaces.
The habitable spaces are fragmented as volumes, to have better contact with the exteriors, to allow plant growth between the blocks and also deprive views by the different displacements. As a small house, possible future growth is planned. The diagonals of the trusses and the wooden diagonals that structure the house crosswise define the shapes of the house. The result is a cozy house that allows them to formulate new challenges.
–Daniel Moreno Flores
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