CONTEXTO

PRIMARY AUTHORS Farid Chacón Francisco Mustieles Claudia Urdaneta CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS Janeth Boza (Architect ) Betzy Fernández (Assistant Architect) Angélica Cerero (Assistant Architect) Paola Márquez (Assistant Architect) Daniel Ferrer (3D Visualizer) Miguel Ángel Andrade (3D Visualizer) Astrid Petzold (Landscape Architecture Adviser) Jose Florentino Ramírez (Structural Engineering) Fernando Domínguez (Electrical Engineering) AUTHOR Rafael Celis PHOTOGRAPHERS Victor Hugo Navarro Assing OBJECTIVES The strategy implemented, conceiving the interior spaces as external and vice versa, it is presented as a succession of unfolded interiors and exteriors sliding rooms: • Two contained patios point out, with nature and light, the border between the private and the social. • A swimming channel accompanies it in its lengthwise course. • Outdoor terraces, arranged in all its facades in different ways: the terrace next to the room generates the duplication of a closed space and when opening the doors generates a space open to the pool and outdoors; the terrace next to the kitchen generates an exit space to services but at the same time a space that will make working in the kitchen much more pleasant thanks to the connection with the outside; and the private terrace next to the rooms that incorporates he green from outside to the space of rest. • A half underground and covered terrace as a small plaza will become the scene of multiple activities in direct contact with the green areas. This succession of interiors and exteriors is accompanied by a horizontal ribbon that comes in and out, defining and showing the sliding rooms, enabling the interior-exterior domesticity. Underneath the ribbon, the interior-exterior dilation of the rooms of the house is framed, while, above, the ribbon defines exclusively in glass, the relationship of the interior with the natural environment where the house is located: on the skirt of the hill and the sky above, the relationship with the afterlife. CONTEXT The house is located on the grounds of an old drive-in movie theater in the city of Valencia, industrial capital of Venezuela. This drive-in movie had already shaped the terrain in an east-west direction, cutting part of the slope of a hill and introducing a slope toward what was the screen of the cinema. The house is located next to one of those cuts of the land, on the high part of the slope. The impetus behind the project seeks: 1. To express in the house a way of being characterized by understanding the inner and outer as domestic, even in the public and the open; where the exterior and interior are continuous as an expression without barriers of that expanded domesticity. Consequently, the basic idea is to provide the construction of spaces that can interact with the outside directly, linking the people with the surrounding nature and so the house does not become an airtight case that loses its connection to the outside, and also respecting the natural relief of most of the terrain. In the tropics the rooms of a house may be inner and outer spaces but overlapping each other; the nature and the house are everywhere. A succession of indoor and outdoor slipped. 2. Hence, three considerations of the client's way of being conditioned the choice of materials: metonymically, firmness and frankness were expressed in the use of reinforced concrete with the form work, and transparency through the use of glass in the enclosures.

ACTUACIÓN

Since its completion, the house has been occupied by its single owner, who also happens to be its constructor. All private spaces like the master bedroom and auxiliary bedrooms were designed with large glass planes and a common balcony overlooking the sky and the sloping terrain. Of his favorite spaces to be considered in the project were: -the grill area, located between the slope and the lap pool, where many social gatherings occur. The grill area is defined by the horizontal built ribbon, which widens to provide shelter for this social gastronomic activity. -The lower lounge area, which doubles as a home theater zone for friends and family, and was glass enclosed for acoustic and climatic purposes. This area can be conveniently entered both from outdoors, by the lap pool steps, or indoors, directly down a glass enclosed staircase. -The kitchen, a warm wood and steel core object, it was envisioned by the owner as part of the indoor-outdoor experience, and overlooks on one side over a private lateral terrace that connects to garage parking, and on the other side to the openness of the views towards the sloping hill and the lap pool/grill area. The house presents itself in the urban built environment, like open arms to receive people, expressing the owner´s openness, but protecting the interior from naughty looks on the lower portion of the main façade, but yet, on the upper portion, it opens up to the sky, like social eyes.