House In The Forest

Written by Omar Dahabra

Location: Puerto Varas, Chile
Year: 2024
Architects: Daiber & Aceituno Arquitectos
Photography by: Marcos Zegers

Bound to a small clearing, the project stands as a subtle interruption in the forest's skin, conceived to the extent that the intervened site accepts the attempt to make it resonate on a human scale. Tall and compact, the volume faces the thicket, for nothing has been artificially cleared, as the protean character of the environment runs alongside the dull red of the cladding, a complementary color to the surrounding green, yet prone to opacity and dialogue, discreet in its luminosity. Light plummets down the trees, filtered by foliage, and is pursued through verticality. Trees grow slender and straight, and the building competes with them in height and through the thresholds that invite them in.

The house's most expressive features lie in its perimeter walls. It's in the friction between interior and exterior where the two main architectural gestures stand out to break with the almost symmetrical regularity of the building's volume: the entrance door and the foundations, both highlighted by arches. The placement and features of the entrance go beyond mere functionality; they exist for their figurative potential, to evoke a symbolic conception of the door as a primordial gesture of privacy, and the origin of domesticity.[i] Along with the staircase required by the elevated foundations, the arch acts as an inscription on the building’s frontispiece, a warning yet also an invitation to acknowledge the threshold’s power and vulnerability. Consistently, the arches of the foundations widen the boundary between the terrain and the building floor, tensing the encounter of two planes that never fully meet.

Inside, the woods unfold in an elemental way. A void is established at the center of the volume, crowned by a large skylight that radiates light toward the second-floor bedrooms, complemented by high windows before it falls over the common area, where a large north-facing window is opposed by a mirror embedded in a balcony that traverses the central void on the second floor. The mirror, like a shining buckle on the belt of light brought by the skylight through the double height, frames the forest in the very center of the volume.

Thus, the light is filtered a second time, divided among heights, reflections, and frames, maintaining its subdued profile, preserving the dimness of the surroundings, and enhancing the sensation of intimacy and shelter. The textures and color temperature of the forest work as the compass of the house, which in turn unfolds it as an event, tearing its fabric to render it a concrete, meaningful interval. A potential space where polarization tends to resolve, allowing another brief yet equally receptive forest to emerge consistent with the reciprocal bond between nature and imagination.
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[i] Iñaki Ábalos attributes this trait to the entrance door of "the existential house," in his analysis of the cabin in the Black Forest in Germany that the philosopher Martin Heidegger lived in from 1922 onward. (Ábalos, Iñaki, The Good Life: A Guided Visit to the Houses of Modernity, Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2000).

Source: www.daiberaceituno.com
Text By: José Badía
Area: 100m2

Omar Dahabra
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