There is a moment in which a construction and demolition look the same. Sometimes, that concrete image —between absence and the promise of a future— becomes a guideline to act on the tangible. If you shed the symbolic sense of the violence that sometimes imposes on the site in which it is, the ruin can be, also, an material and temporal inventory.

In this rehabilitation we pursued the virtue of what still feels firm, with an intuitive approximation that was almost an faith act: completing what was left vacant, upgrading the resources beginning right where it all ended. Stop seeing the traceability between eras, to vindicate the act of repair, even using parts that were already considered “obsolete”. In this high forest mountain, on the remnant of an ancient school, lands the structure of a greenhouse: a gesture of anchorage to the rural and time resistance.

Archaeology can be the variable that balances the equation between times. For architecture, it is a way of thinking that allows escaping from the replacement clamp, the impulse of wanting to start from scratch.

On La Calera mountain, we seek to read the pre-existence as a stream of tangible memory, a stream that invites us to recognize the footprints of the past, even those of which was only soil.
The architecture is born out of that desire: illuminating the shadow of the past and imagining the ways of living to come.

We appropriate the greenhouse typology as a way of restoring a ruin.

Doing it like a lightweight piece, almost of a removing and putting action, that perches to extend the time of what already existed. The glass box as a mediator between two times: between the material and weather, between what was and what will grow back.

Thanks to Angela, and her family, José Fernando Cáceres, Daniel Molina and the Yemail Architecture team.

Metal structure
Mauricio Velázquez

Site Manager
Jose Fernando Cáceres 

General Foreman 
Wilman Chaparro 

Project team
Antonio Yemail + Daniel Molina