Pablo Tourenc

FOTÓGRAFO

Federico Cairoli

OBJETIVO

Respecting the landscape, fleeing from concrete as the only constructive solution.

The premise of Casa Tejida has been to explore and try to innovate in this aspect by working with prefabricated solutions, but with a high degree of craftsmanship where the carpentry and metal details have been produced as pieces of a puzzle to be assembled on site very quickly. Thus we created a group of small companies that work together to generate a new way of building in Colombia, with certified wood, and in turn allow communities to understand other paradigms of how to make their homes, more environmentally friendly, better ventilated and healthier and habitable at the end of the day.

Building less is a necessity for the future.

Building less and better was the first exercise of responsibility that we assumed as architects. To understand that in order to have a more sustainable house, with environmental, but also economic and political implications, we must build less.
The house becomes a protector, a place a little away from the forest and the natural farm, but totally in relation to biodiversity. This house not only builds less in surface, but also uses less materials, dispensing with construction elements such as interior divisions, insulation and interior cladding on facades, floor and ceiling, as the weather conditions allow it, being a house totally open to the environment where some mornings the clouds come in for breakfast. Less is more as the master used to say.

CONTEXTO

This is a place where there is a rural and dispersed community made up of a few families arranged along an unpaved mountain road that is very difficult to access. The area is usually very difficult to access due to its rugged and rough terrain, and is isolated during some days of heavy rains. During the first phase of the project, we contacted the town hall and, in collaboration with the people of the community, reconstructed the road to facilitate truck access to the project.
Due to the difficult access to the site, we decided to install ourselves and live with the community during the process, a few meters from the Casa Tejida. The project had to be prefabricated in some way, and to another extent decided and designed as it progressed, a different way of working that allows for greater involvement of the local community.

ACTUACIÓN

Casa Tejida proposes an architecture that relates to the environment and the context in which it is developed, but not exclusively from its physical form, but from the learning processes that have taken place. From the beginning, Casa Tejida has had the will to generate a community for the transmission of knowledge and collective construction. The six-month process of construction and assembly of the house has been a hotbed of learning and training for many of us, where new ways of doing architecture, agriculture and landscape have been mixed into the team's way of life.

The repetitive wood structure of Casa Tejida is inspired from pre-Hispanic architecture, where some columns are buried in the ground while others simply rest on stones, with the idea that in the early years those buried wooden pillars hold the house, but years later when they become rotten, the columns resting on the stones hold the bearing load. Proposing a three step design, which enables to leave open items once the construction began, gave us the opportunity to explore the region looking for local non-standardized and intelligent constructive solutions that could be applied. Finding the woven facade of the house was one of the most beautiful moments of the process: On the way to the site from Bogota, we casually met Maria, who has a natural fibers woven furniture business, together we worked on adapting her weaving techniques into a construction element, resulting in an innovative implementation for the project and also for Maria’s business.