Project: Stranded House
Architects: WHALE!
Location: Tunquen, Chile
Area: 1,937 sf
Photographs by: Hugo Bertolotto
WHALE! has designed the Stranded House – an almost 2,000 square foot contemporary dwelling located in Tunquen, Chile. It sits on a plot surrounded by untamed natural landscapes, delivering spectacular views from each direction.
A stranded whale
Dry his back under the sun of a breezeless summer
Opaque as an ancient ash
Pale gray as a collected stone,
The sand under its belly still keeps the necessary moisture
To dig up shells and weeds
And the tiny coals
With which we could draw the darkest shade,
That will be the most brilliant and wet black,
Just as the sad floors of STALKER,
We’d never touched the skin of a dolphin,
But we can feel the touch,
Soft like hair underwater,
Shiny and thick as the finest sheepskin
But: Can we guess how it feels to touch a whale drying under a January sun?
A whale aground between chaguales and litres
After a massive flood,
Rest half dead looking the Casablanca estuary,
Barely glimps the sad glow of the tin roofs
That grow as garbage Fields in the middle of meadow
Forgetting at his back the Quintay’s slaughterhouse,
Where many souls were silenced
The house is located in Tunquén, 122 km away from Santiago, in an área with gullies and ravinesthat steer the water into the valley. The site overlooks a landscape where the boxed estuary opens to the Tunquén wetland, before merging with the main beach and the Pacific Ocean.
The main plan is a simple beach house, with 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and an open space for living room, dining room and kitchen; plus 2 terraces, one indoor and one exposed. The scheme is built in two volumes that are intersected and overlapped. The floor layout reflects the turning point of the concave topography in relation to the landscape .
The construction system is made of rigid frames, built on pine wood (2 x 6″), and distanced 95 cm, where each frame is different from another. However, the roof is continuous and homogeneous, trapping in a single gesture the different moments of the house.
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