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Avitare / Casa Sofía
Avitare / Casa Sofía
Aguadilla, Puerto Rico
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Other Projects by HACEDORMAKER_
Avitare / Casa Sofía
Aguadilla, Puerto Rico
Avitare / Casa Sofía [CS/A] was designed as the premier property for developer ALR, an upstart boutique, short-term rental operator in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. The house is sited on a rectangular, north-facing parcel, on top of a forested cliff that overlooks the Atlantic Ocean.
The design brief was programmatically simple yet architecturally particular: It requested 5 rooms with private bathrooms, a kitchen with dining space, indoor and outdoor lounging areas, a pool, a two-car garage, and additional parking space within the property, all while achieving maximum frontal privacy towards the street, and the highest visual permeability from inside the house towards the cliff and the ocean.
With a length to width ratio of 3 to 1 the site was proportionally narrow, thus requiring various volumetric studies to determine the optimal layout. The conceptual epiphany, though straightforward, only came a few days into the massing exercises at the office, from conversing with the client about our initial site visit. That first exploration occurred during a typical Caribbean day, under heavy sun, with everyone naturally aligned towards the north, looking at the sea while using their hands to cover their eyes, even through sunglasses and hats, as if we were all looking through hand-formed periscopes. It then became clear that the future building should comport like a viewfinder to the sea, akin to an optical funnel towards the landscape, to frame the view while providing protection from the sun and blocking other sources of light.
The site is characterized by its flat, mountaintop location, an advantaged ocean view, its relative narrowness, and by a diagonal edge that suddenly drops at the end of the property. These aspects all informed the final “T-shaped” configuration of the house, with the bedrooms aligned like boxes in a row longitudinally with the site, and the public area - kitchen, dining and living room - as a large rectangular volume anchored transversely, perpendicular to the coastline. The slanted property edge at the north boundary, a fundamental aspect of the site, was made into an architectural leitmotif throughout the project, evidently visible at the trumpet-like entrance threshold, on the knife-like, protruding central skylight, on the triangularly edged pool and master bedroom balcony, and as superficial ornament at the background wall in the dining area where a concrete cladding was crafted using custom-designed concrete tiles based on a repeating, triangular-plan-shaped tridimensional module.
The house, which resembles a series of folded flat plates, is mostly built of reinforced concrete characterized by the alternating contrast between smooth plastered and board-formed exposed surfaces, with various aluminum screens filtering the openings, and by a prominent structure composed of tall, inverted beams arranged orthogonally. The roof, which resembles a concrete waffle throughout, is designed to behave as a thermal ballast, accumulating rainwater in a shallow, pool-like open cistern below future PV arrays. While the frontal façade maintains a hermetic aspect, with slight, calibrated openings that serve as prelude to the landscape view, once inside the house opens abruptly towards the patio, with a structural steel colonnade minimally filtering the view towards the pool and eventually to the sea.
In the end CS/A, a hybrid between a rectilinear geological formation and an architectural version of Mattel’s View-Finder, is simply a series of concrete boxes of expanding porosity that provide shelter while framing the view towards the horizon.
The design brief was programmatically simple yet architecturally particular: It requested 5 rooms with private bathrooms, a kitchen with dining space, indoor and outdoor lounging areas, a pool, a two-car garage, and additional parking space within the property, all while achieving maximum frontal privacy towards the street, and the highest visual permeability from inside the house towards the cliff and the ocean.
With a length to width ratio of 3 to 1 the site was proportionally narrow, thus requiring various volumetric studies to determine the optimal layout. The conceptual epiphany, though straightforward, only came a few days into the massing exercises at the office, from conversing with the client about our initial site visit. That first exploration occurred during a typical Caribbean day, under heavy sun, with everyone naturally aligned towards the north, looking at the sea while using their hands to cover their eyes, even through sunglasses and hats, as if we were all looking through hand-formed periscopes. It then became clear that the future building should comport like a viewfinder to the sea, akin to an optical funnel towards the landscape, to frame the view while providing protection from the sun and blocking other sources of light.
The site is characterized by its flat, mountaintop location, an advantaged ocean view, its relative narrowness, and by a diagonal edge that suddenly drops at the end of the property. These aspects all informed the final “T-shaped” configuration of the house, with the bedrooms aligned like boxes in a row longitudinally with the site, and the public area - kitchen, dining and living room - as a large rectangular volume anchored transversely, perpendicular to the coastline. The slanted property edge at the north boundary, a fundamental aspect of the site, was made into an architectural leitmotif throughout the project, evidently visible at the trumpet-like entrance threshold, on the knife-like, protruding central skylight, on the triangularly edged pool and master bedroom balcony, and as superficial ornament at the background wall in the dining area where a concrete cladding was crafted using custom-designed concrete tiles based on a repeating, triangular-plan-shaped tridimensional module.
The house, which resembles a series of folded flat plates, is mostly built of reinforced concrete characterized by the alternating contrast between smooth plastered and board-formed exposed surfaces, with various aluminum screens filtering the openings, and by a prominent structure composed of tall, inverted beams arranged orthogonally. The roof, which resembles a concrete waffle throughout, is designed to behave as a thermal ballast, accumulating rainwater in a shallow, pool-like open cistern below future PV arrays. While the frontal façade maintains a hermetic aspect, with slight, calibrated openings that serve as prelude to the landscape view, once inside the house opens abruptly towards the patio, with a structural steel colonnade minimally filtering the view towards the pool and eventually to the sea.
In the end CS/A, a hybrid between a rectilinear geological formation and an architectural version of Mattel’s View-Finder, is simply a series of concrete boxes of expanding porosity that provide shelter while framing the view towards the horizon.
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