A house woven into the landscape. Tejida House by Zuloark and Santiago Pradilla Arquitectos

Description of project by Zuloark and Santiago Pradilla Arquitectos

Tejida House is an experimental home associated with a family coffee plantation in an isolated rural community in the Cundinamarca region, Colombia. It is an exercise of professional responsibility towards the environment and the society where it is established. During the design and construction process, a community of work and coexistence has been formed, including the maximum number of possible agents in decision-making, understanding the entire process as an opportunity for learning and training through the prototyping of the house. Casa Tejida is not only physically woven, but also weaves the landscape where it is implanted through the participation in the project of its inhabitants, thematizing social construction, open and intelligent design, biodiverse architecture and low environmental impact, and trying to innovate in architectural models for the future development of rural areas of Colombia.

The Paradise. Nocaima. In the world there are many paradises, and La Vereda Fical is one of them. It belongs to the municipality of Nocaima, in Cundinamarca, Colombia, an hour and a half from Bogotá, the country's capital. It is a rural and dispersed community that consists of approximately twenty families arranged along an unpaved mountain path that is very difficult to access, where each family has different resources that they share with the rest of the community. Until very recently, the area, due to its proximity to the capital but its rugged and wild orography, was very difficult for visitors to access, becoming isolated during some days with a lot of rain. This particularity, together with the temperate climate of the area, has made this hillside a place of incredible biodiversity, where farmers, coffee and sugar cane plantations, natural bamboo forests and the most diverse animal species coexist in harmony.

Critical object. Building learning environments. Casa Tejida proposes an architecture that is related to the environment and context in which it develops, but not exclusively from its physical form, but from the learning processes that have occurred throughout the entire process. Just as the forms of formal learning no longer consist of the transmission of knowledge in a linear or vertical way, the construction and design process of Casa Tejida has had from the beginning the will to generate new forms of collaboration between all the agents that have participated. in the same. The generation of a community for the transmission of knowledge and collective construction has been one of the engines of the construction phase of the project. The formation of a construction team that was composed of specialized construction foremen, with young people from the community, in collaboration with the design team, students and architects and the clients themselves, has allowed the six-month construction and assembly process de la casa has been a hotbed of learning and training for many of us, where themes about new ways of doing architecture, agriculture and landscape have been mixed in the way of life of the team.

Live in the work. Being part of the community. The difficult access to the work site led us to make the decision to settle to live during the process in the community of the vereda, a few meters from the Casa Tejida. Building this community, when in turn we built an architecture so closely, and the relationships that were produced around it, made the knowledge of each of the inhabitants shared and common to all during the time in which the agents involved have been living on this steep terrain. Usually, the local people usually create small terraces and esplanades where they locate the houses so that the longest sides always go with the topography. This creates a side of the house with very good views and a dead, closed side of the house, a “backyard”, in addition to the stagnant runoff problems that this generates. Casa Tejida is located perpendicular to the terrain, better adapting to the existing terrain and avoiding large earth movements, so common in the area, taking advantage of the best solar orientation and creating two completely different gardens outside.

Collective Intelligences. Learning from local construction techniques. The house learns from the stilt houses of Colombia, disposing each 126 cm. a wooden module-truss. It alludes to the ancient knowledge of pre-Hispanic architecture in which, in an interspersed way, some columns are buried in the ground and others simply rest on stones, with the idea that in the first years those buried sticks support the house but, years Afterwards, they rot away and the weight is also exerted by the columns resting on the stones.In a first design phase, we made the decision to start the work without having resolved the choice of some of the materials that were going to be used in the finishes. . We proposed a design in phases that could be modified once the work began, with the intention of exploring the region in search of non-standardized and intelligent construction solutions that could be applied to the design. Finding the enclosure of the house was one of the most beautiful moments of the process. On the way home from Bogotá, just twenty minutes from it, we met María, who has a furniture weaving business with natural fibers at the foot of the main road. Together, we work on adapting their furniture weaving techniques to adapt it as an architectural constructive element, resulting in an innovative application for the project and also for María.

They told us the story of the three little pigs wrong. Escape from concrete as the only constructive solution. In Colombia, despite its natural wealth and forests, there is not much tradition in wood construction; palafitic architecture is understood as a construction of poor communities or constructions for tourists in the Caribbean areas. Since we have worked together, Santiago and Zuloark, we are obsessed with proposing architectures with materials that are more in line with the places where they are, generating less impact, providing high-quality architectural solutions and innovation, without all of this implying an excessive increase in price. Casa Tejida has had as a premise to explore and try to innovate in this aspect working with prefabricated solutions, but with a high degree of craftsmanship where the guilds of wood and metal details have been produced as pieces of a puzzle to assemble on site in a way. very fast. Thus, we created a group of small companies that work together to generate a new way of building in Colombia, with certified wood, and that in turn allows communities to understand other paradigms of how to make their houses, more in keeping with the environment, better ventilated and healthier and livable after all.

Open layout. Learning from the digital world. The way Casa Tejida is designed and built, which learns from digital manufacturing and open source systems, makes it understandable to everyone. The growth of the structure on site has in itself been a learning process for the community, but not only that: the open and replicable form of design has allowed anyone interested, from clients to the team's own architects and designers, to participate. of the assembly of the same.How to take a picture of this house? With the doors open or closed? Opening those on the left gives one sensation, opening those on the right quite another. It is inevitable not to be continually playing with light. At night, all the doors closed and the lights off, except those outside ... what a wonderful way to experience the nocturnal landscape of living the countryside, being in the comfort of home!

Less is less. Building less is an obligation for the future. Building less, building less and better, was the first exercise of responsibility that we assumed together with the clients. Usually, we tend to think that maximizing a house, arranging rooms and areas for each of the desired uses, is the best way to think about our home as users. It has been an exercise of responsibility on the part of Pablo and Juana, in collaboration with the team of architects, to understand that in order to have a better house, with some implications of environmental impact, but also economic and political, we have to build less. This has meant thinking differently about how to live in the house and all the experiences that can be had in it, with a floor area of ​​about 60 m2 but using all the nooks and crannies of the structure, and the intermediate and covered spaces of the same, almost 120 m2 useful are achieved. The house and its wooden floor, aided by a small lower Japanese-style entrance space, where we take off our shoes, turn the entire wooden surface of the floor into a seating area. Transitional spaces have also been eliminated: one is in the field or is in the house simultaneously, there are no midpoints. The house becomes a protector, a place a bit removed from the forest and the natural farm, but completely in relation to biodiversity. And this house not only builds less in area, but also in materials, dispensing with constructive elements such as interior divisions, insulators and interior plating on facades, floor and roof, since the weather conditions allow it, being a house completely open to the environment, where some mornings the clouds come in at breakfast.

What is being at home? Where does the house really end? The house invites you to walk around it, to be aware of the light. In the house you are never completely inside, you are always a little outside. The house invites you to live in a special way: either you are upstairs or you are downstairs, or it is open or it is closed, or you are in the cultivation of coffee or you are in that humid oasis between the magic of orchids, ferns and bamboo.