A stranded whale

Dry his back under the sun of a breezeless summer

Opaque as an ancient ash

Pale gray as a collected stone,

The sand under its belly still kepps the necessary moisture

To dig up shells and weeds

And the tiny coals

With which we could draw the darkest shade,

That will be the most brilliant and wet black,

Just as the sad floors of STALKER,

We’d never touched the skin of a dolphin,

But we can feel the touch,

Soft like hair underwater,

Shiny and thick as the finest  sheepskin

But: Can we guess how it feels to touch a whale drying under a January  sun?

A whale aground between chaguales and litres

After a massive flood,

Rest half dead looking the Casablanca estuary,

Barely glimps the sad glow of the tin roofs

That grow as garbage Fields in the middle of meadow

Forgetting at his back the Quintay’s slaughterhouse,

Where many souls were silenced.

The house is located in Tunquén, 122 km away from Santiago, in an área with gullies and ravinesthat steer the water into the valley. The site overlooks a landscape where the boxed estuary opens to the Tunquén wetland, before merging with the main beach and the Pacific Ocean.

The main plan is a simple beach house, with 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and an open space for  living room, dining room and kitchen; plus 2 terraces, one indoor and one exposed.

The scheme is built in two volumes that are intersected and overlapped.

The floor layout reflects the turning point of the concave topography in relation to the landscape.

The construction system is made of rigid frames, built on pine wood (2 x 6"), and  distanced 95 cm, where each frame is different from another. However, the roof is continuous and homogeneous, trapping in a single gesture the different moments of the house.