Casa Apolo 11 by Parra + Edwards Arquitectos (Video)

Chilian studio Parra + Edwards Arquitectos has completed the Casa Apolo 11 project in 2007.

This 1,033 square foot two-story residence is located in La Reina, a city in Santiago province, Chili.

Casa Apolo 11 by Parra + Edwards Architects (via Google Translate):

“Secluded retreat in a forest.

“The woods are lovely. Dark and deep ” – Robert Frost

Apollo 11 is a shop house in the middle of a grove of elms at the foot of the Andes, on the outskirts of the city of Santiago. The house was baptized with that name because it is designed like a ship that landed in a forest without touching it at any time and will undertake his departure, leaving the forest intact.

Apollo 11 also for the laboratory conditions: This house functions as architecture workshop, recording studio and rehearsal room acoustic and electric music. It is a capsule that support in full the life of his crew, a family of architects and musicians.

The program is organized in two levels from a rectangular 6 x 9 mts. in 6 mts. high. The rectangle, for the Japanese is the only element that does not distort the nature, is a clean element that tends to disappear. The simplicity of the box also helps the idea of ??occupying the forest floor minimum while maximizing the heat inside the ship as it landed in a place that is very cold in winter. With two levels of heating is easy and is oriented in their bedrooms to the north with large windows that take the stored heat energy and heat through the glass. In summer the foliage of the elms control acts as natural sunlight.

The box is a simple grid structure coated metal plates on their skin for plywood of 18 mm. glass plates and allowing full and empty that resemble the dark and light fragments produced in the foliage of trees. The skeleton of this structure is always visible, with the metal profiles metaphor from the trunks and branches of this new forest and wood planes of the leaves of the tree. That’s why their facades are indefinite and change in different seasons of the year through mobile web pages are the thermal checked in and out depending on what is happening in the forest itself.

Inside the ship, the inhabitant is a guest, a silent spectator of the nature of the forest in all its dimensions, as a temporary crew capsule observation ephemeral aware of their status in a place that belongs to him, but that is not property.”