Project: Tiny House
Architects: Cazú Zegers Arquitectura
Location: Lo Barnechea, Chile
Area: 742 sf
Year: 2022
Photographs by: Marcos Zegers
Tiny House by Cazú Zegers Arquitectura
The Tiny House project in Lo Barnechea, Santiago, envisions a small neighborhood named Pueblo La Dehesa, comprising three prefabricated housing typologies. The designs, ranging from 24.5 m2 to 69.02 m2, emphasize sustainable living with kitchens, dining areas, and living rooms. The overall concept focuses on organic urbanization inspired by botanical shyness, creating clusters resembling a dense forest with small pedestrian passages. Pine Clear wood and iron were the primary materials, and strategic prefabrication ensured efficiency. Architectural inventions include a sculptural steel staircase inspired by Japanese origami and invisible doors for a clean, modular exterior. Interior design by Zegers and Figueroa, with furniture by Bontempo, enhances luminosity and amplitude. MK supplies bath and kitchen artifacts, and Modular RCM handles housing construction.
The Tiny House project arises from the commission to propose a small neighborhood in the commune of Lo Barnechea (Santiago), which would be named after Pueblo La Dehesa. Under contemporary and sustainable eaves, it was asked to design a small town composed of three typologies of prefabricated and small housing. Type A house, 24.5 m2, considers a bedroom and a bathroom, the second B -type B, 69.02 m2, includes two bedrooms and a single bath. Finally, type C, 63 m2 housing, consisted of two bedrooms and two bathrooms.
The three typologies included a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room (living). The project considered an organic assembly to form sets from 12 units, to finally achieve 600 modules. This totality was designed to include small services within the neighborhood, such as coffee, bakeries, and gourmet warehouse, among others. Its purpose was to form a cluster system in the manner of a densified pedestrian town that is immersed in a park open to the mountains and the mountain buttuestra. For this reason, we saw a fundamental understanding of these units as a pixel within a larger system (considering the final goal of 600 pieces).
To respond to this requirement, it was necessary to understand the whole as a totality, giving rise to generating organic urbanization. First, we sought to move away from regular urbanization designs that do not allow the deployment of life and meeting places. It is here that the intention of Cazú Zegers appears and his study for generating organic urbanization, where the design concept was characterized by observing the behavior of a dense forest.
This finally led to experiencing the concept of botanical shyness, which refers to the ability of trees to detect the adjacent tree, so they avoid ranking, generating small alleys between them. This, in turn, allowed us to design and plan how each piece is located in the place, generating groups with its small pedestrian passages. Citing botanical shyness these units were grouped in the territory, putting together the small town through this foliage system.
The main material worked was Pine Clear wood abroad and iron in the case of some elements. One of the architectural inventions that stands out in this project is the strategic prefabrication work to solve the three modular typologies. In turn, another of these inventions was the steel staircase, which worked and was inspired by Japanese origami.
This defined that a piece of steel was manipulated as a sheet of paper, which gives the project a sculptural element. On the other hand, the doors were worked invisible, avoiding incorporating a frame to deliver to the inhabitant a sensation of wide space within the module. This same strategy, in addition, allowed a clean and modular result of homes when looking on the outside, which is also visualized on its terraces that project the internal space.
The interior design proposal aimed to highlight spaces for the deployment of life, incorporating elements that supported a greater sense of luminosity and amplitude. The interior design of the house was in charge of Zegers and Figueroa, and the materialization of furniture was carried out by Bontempo. The bath and kitchen artifacts are MK, while the construction of modular housing was made by Modular RCM.
