FEB
On a hill surrounded by 10 acres of land, the site of the Refugia hotel overlooks the bay of the Rilan peninsula. From here it is around 18km from Chile’s capital but it may as well be a far greater distance, such is its physical isolation and conceptual abstraction from the life in the metropolis. Read more
JAN
In the 20 x 20 House, designed by Felipe Assadi and Francisca Pulido, that Miesian maxim: “God is in the detail”, seems to resonate.
There is arguably a religious zealotry when the dimension of a ceramic tile is allowed to dictate the dimensional grid of every aspect of an entire building, producing a sort of cosmological map of the architect’s entire universe. The approach, once popular amongst minimalists, fell out of favour sometime after the point when every talentless architect on the planet used it as a justification to produce the most tedious and nauseating buildings imaginable.
Thankfully, Assadi and Pulido who worked with Trinidad Schonthaler have managed to produce an exciting architectural expression that is both crafted and creative. The architecture is developed on a 20 x 20 inches three dimensional grid that is applied to and is part of every aspect of the building. Inside and outside!
In receiving a very strict brief from the client, the architect found comparative freedom to design by imposing the even more rigid tile grid…
APR
Whilst following the logic of an idea, whenever it might take you, can be devastatingly powerful, sometimes it leads to folly. In architecture, the excessive use of say a façade module in the pursuit of rationalism, has often led to excessive…tedium.
In the case of the Panel House, by Alejandro Soffia and Gabriel Rudolphy the results are nothing of the sort. They are beautiful with enough variation to create an interesting architectural expression with its own clear and powerful logic. Read more
