The desire to inhabit users on a serene landscape, vast and full of trees, where nature is able to show its greatness, has led to identify a place in the Ricaurte sector in Cuenca-Ecuador, an almost intact site that in the morning gets rid of a characteristic mist of the mountains of the area that floats on the sloping territory guiding the gaze towards the treetops, mountains and clouds.
Working with the natural slope of the site allows observing the architecture like a landscape and to buildings like its mountains, we generate a artificial territory a landscape within another that rises to move between treetops building geography rather than architecture.
This artificial geography allows social areas to approach the trees enjoying the visual, the wind and the shadows of the morning as well they are also supported by private mass areas that avoid direct solar radiation in the afternoon and retain heat for cold of the night, all these spaces in platforms and gardens are unified in a promenade that follows the silhouette of the topography circulating in a place of shadows, exposing you to the height of the trees and disconnecting you from a domestic scale; finishing its journey in a plain that you about to touch the treetops away from the daily allowing contemplate the natural cycle and find themselves, resulting in stones and plants
In the form of appropriating the territory by “not touching the ground” and not affecting the scale of the place, it is wanted that the element appears minimal before the height of the trees, eliminating all verticality so as not to cover the horizon, in the same way, Closing the private spaces to avoid the incidence of the sun allows the user to obtain the particularity of observing and not being seen, of granting privacy to hide those who live, allowing a life that is deeply free from all moral and social vigilance.
What should be the first impression of the subject with the matter?
Upon arriving at the site invaded by a haze that for centuries has been floating in the imaginary of dreams, where the only private space is the mind, it exposes thought to endow the concentrated mass of security and energy efficiency in one piece. suspended weightless like a cloud over that serene landscape, where however, the stone is remarkably heavy and typically anchored to the ground, cut out to generate a colorful threshold like the skirts of the “Cholas Cuencanas” that incites you to reach beyond that concrete natural scenario in a material capable of resisting and adapting to the passage of time, endowing it with timelessness since it was always floating in that place within the thought and desire that will allow levitating matter, possessing even of mass, but no longer of terrestrial gravity elevating you to the world of Dreams.
Coming to create an image no longer of lightness but of levitated matter, of gravitational indifference.
Architects: Ruptura Morlaca Arquitectura
Location: Cuenca, Ecuador
Architects in Charge: Paul Chango, Carolina Bravo
Area: 200.0 m2
Project Year: 2017
Photographs: Ruptura Morlaca
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