Project: Sun House
Architects: Bernardo Bustamante Arquitectos
Location: Yaruqui, Ecuador
Area: 2,583 sf
Photographs by: Courtesy of Bernardo Bustamante Arquitectos
Sun House by Bernardo Bustamante Arquitectos
The Sun House is a compact modern dwelling located on a hill near the town of Yaruqui in Ecuador. This single-story dwelling is blessed with stunning views of the Andes, the valleys below and the City of Quito in the distance. It was designed by Bernardo Bustamante Arquitectos, a studio whose El Guarango House project was already featured on our site. It is in fact quite similar to the Sun House.
A weekend house, located in one of the hills that create a border around the town of Yaruquí, which is noticeably developed by the new airport of Quito.
The hillside terrain with a regular slope offers impressive views towards the Tababela Valley, with the City of Quito as a backdrop.
The lot is large, which allowed the dispersion of the program and enabled us to design a a single leveled building, thus reducing costs. The project has a bar as axis and a satellite; the 21 meter long bar distributes the program in a linear way, so that all spaces open onto a large porch facing the view and merging the interior with the exterior. At the same time, the horizontally placed bars provide a better adaption to natural topography of the location. The satellite contains the covered parking lots and a large warehouse.
In this area of the Andes of Quito, it has been a tradition to build with the land of the mountains, raw for the adobes or burned for bricks or tiles. The color of the buildings in the landscape is therefore the same color as the ground. In order to maintain coherence with the surroundings, the brick was emptied and used as the fundamental raw material, which allowed to solve the details in many ways.
The structure is metallic, prefabricated in a workshop and assembled on site. The carpentries are also metallic, with a system of sliding and folding doors that shield the house, in order to protect it whenever uninhabited. It also performs as a large blind to shield the porch from the sun or, in certain times of the year, from the wind. In short, it is a contemporary house that uses traditional resources, optimizes materials and allows an agile, cheap and sustainable construction over time.
In short, it is a contemporary house that uses traditional resources, optimizes materials and allows an agile, cheap and sustainable construction over time.
