A cabin stands on the edge of a hill overlooking the valley of Cota, a municipality in the savannah of Bogotá, at an altitude of 2566 meters above sea level. The house finds its origin in the story of another built in 2007 in Sisga, which served as the founding project of our office: a butterfly-cut cabin built with the selvages discarded by sawyers when cutting down a pine forest. The vocation to dispense with the unnecessary is the common thread that connects the questions of then with those of now, and as a whole with that appreciation of the primitive life that is in the promise of inhabiting a cabin.
The house is situated in front of a body of forest that protects it from the winds coming down from the east and extends in an orthogonal volume oriented towards the west and the distant views. The undulation of the terrain dictates that the utmost care is taken to rise on stilts.
The spaces are concentrated in a molded bar with actions that define the interior comfort and the relationship with the immediate ground. At the ends, the bedrooms end in boxes that contain the closets providing privacy and depth to the modulated wooden windows, which owe much to Japanese architecture.
In the middle, the living room, dining room and kitchen come together, extending like a box on an outdoor deck that floats on the steepest point and offers a visual conversation between the interior and the changing weather of the landscape. Between the living room and the master bedroom, a small ritual is celebrated with the transit through a corridor that cuts through the volume, refined by the presence of a canopy of Chinese acacias framed by the east and a desk contained within the resulting courtyard. The gabled volume with eaves at the ends is redefined by the anomaly of a double-height cylinder in exposed brick that gravitates with another weight and gives root to the lightness of the wooden box. It also articulates the entrance with the transition through the vestibule, hiding a tank against the ground.
The cabin is a kind of reverence for the natural world and, from there, for the materials of the built world. The annealed clay roof tiles reflect the coppery hues of the sunset, while the interior trusses of tecumanii pine are displayed between white walls that know how to reflect their shadow.
In the words of the Smithsons: "this particular handling of materials, not in the craft sense, but in its intellectual appreciation, has always been present in the modern movement, and has certainly been something known, what is new about it is that it finds its closest affinities not in an architectural style of the past, but in traditional but never fashionable forms of peasant housing: a poetics without rhetoric."
The spirit of the materials is manifested thanks to the hands of the foreman Arbey, who knows like no one else the material from which this mountain is made. The exercise of inhabiting is felt in the warmth of life given by María, León and Anabel. Daniel Molina was the architect in charge, and Mateo Pérez was behind the lens of these September photos.
