Wall House

Santiago de Chile
2004-2007

As opposed to the general notion that our living environments can be properly described and designed “in plan”, this project is a design investigation into how the qualitative aspects of the wall, as a complex membrane, structure our social interactions and climatic relationships and enable specific ecologies to develop. The project breaks down the “traditional” walls of a house into a series of four delaminated layers (concrete cave, stacked shelving, milky shell, soft skin ) in between which the different spaces of the house slip. Each layer is characterized by very specific climatic, atmospheric, structural, material and functional properties and through that becomes part of the intelligent hierarchy underlying this low-budget project: while the innermost zones host the most demanding areas (e.g. kitchen and bathroom) the house and its materials roughen up toward the outside. From the inside out, the layers build upon one another, both materially, in terms of the climate concept and geometrically, blurring the boundary between the interior and the exterior and creating, through the specificity of the different materials used (many of which are not common in architectural applications), a series of qualitatively distinct environments. The building’s most standout feature, an energy screen typically used in greenhouse construction, constitutes the outermost layer, creating not only a diffused lighting and comfortably climatized zone inside but also, through its folding and sometimes- reflective/sometimes-translucent surface, contributes to the diamond-cut appearance of the structure.