Casa Barro Negro departs from a fundamental conviction: contemporary architecture must continue to look toward the reuse of consolidated spaces and existing or abandoned infrastructure. Within these pre-existing conditions lies not only material value, but also the possibility of reactivating important spatial and heritage legacies, as a counterweight to indiscriminate modern accumulation and its environmental consequences.
Casa Barro Negro emerges as an exercise in the recovery of an old adobe construction, one that bears witness to the traditional ways of dwelling and building characteristic of the Valle de Tenza region in Cundinamarca, Colombia. The pre-existing structure embodied both the material logic and the typological configurations of rural housing, establishing a deep connection between architecture, time, and landscape. From this condition, the project proposes an approach that seeks to reactivate and reference these inherited characteristics, opposing the inevitable modernization of rural housing in the area, a process that has worked against the region's inhabitants through rising costs of industrialized materials and the indiscriminate use of concrete and its damaging environmental practices.
What stands out most in the project is its profound relationship with the landscape, rooted in its materiality and the imminent passage of time across its aura. The landscape always refers us to time, to the natural world, to rocks, trees, and earth. The house's expansive relationship with its surroundings suggests a transparency of the object within nature, recalling Rowe and Robert Slutzky's writings on the theory of significant form and their reference to phenomenal transparency. At the same time, this relationship with landscape and time connects both the pre-existing structure and the project to what Peter Zumthor describes as the originary essence of elements, developing an architecture that springs from things and returns to things.
The domestic space is constructed from a sensory and material approach, where wood, clay, and metal are assembled into a restrained palette that privileges texture, time, and tactile proximity. Natural light, together with the presence of the garden, introduces constant variations that transform the perception of space throughout the day, shaping an atmospheric experience that oscillates between domestic warmth and the intensity of a natural place. The project establishes affinities with the material explorations of Joseph Beuys and Richard Serra, where matter acquires an expressive condition capable of revealing its own essence.
The main entrance is framed by an adobe ruin, a remnant of a former section of the house, assumed here as threshold and narrative. Its materiality, eroded by time, makes the passage of years visible and reaffirms the value of local elements as active agents in the construction of habitability, in closer harmony with the surrounding environment. Situated within a logic akin to Arte Povera, this operation foregrounds the expressive power of the essential and the pre-existing, alongside the idea that restoration is not separate from innovation, nor from proposals for new configurations of inhabiting space and its forms.
