Casa 2 - Sisga 2008 - Yemail Arquitectura

Project Details

House 2 – Sisga 2008

DESCRIPTION

Casa Barn is a project in Sisga, Cundinamarca, that explores a form of rural domesticity in which housing, work, animal care, and everyday production do not appear as separate programs, but as parts of the same domestic ecology. The house is understood as a hybrid structure: a place to live, work, gather, store, ventilate, clean, repair, and coexist with the practical rhythms of rural life.

The strategy combines the comforts associated with urban living—connectivity, permanence, and domestic convenience—with the operational dimension of a farm. The result is an intensive and interconnected system capable of changing its use, enclosure, temperature, and degree of exposure throughout the day. Rather than simply a house in the countryside, the project proposes a productive domestic infrastructure.

The program is organized as two stacked residential blocks connected by a large central barn. On the ground floor, a small two-bedroom apartment is associated with the daily tasks of management and care. On the upper floor, a loft occupies the level above and opens toward the shared double-height space. Between them, a large gathering area crossed by a ship’s ladder operates simultaneously as vertical connection, meeting place, and shared void.

During the day, the base of the project can accommodate heavy-duty uses: storing a tractor, allowing horses or cows to pass through, keeping tools, cleaning, moving, and working. Its materiality responds to this condition through durable, easy-to-maintain surfaces capable of withstanding everyday wear. Above, on the mezzanine, the atmosphere shifts toward a more domestic condition associated with gathering, rest, and contemplation of the landscape.

The house incorporates movable devices and elements that rotate or open to regulate ventilation, shade, enclosure, and the relationship with the exterior. These operations create an adaptable architecture capable of negotiating between exposure and shelter, work and rest, field and room.

The project can also be understood as a process of mediation. Organizing the program through combined areas of work and housing responds to a negotiation between different ways of living: those of the client, his children, the caretaker family, and the daily activities of the farm. Architecture does not radically separate these lives, but instead establishes different degrees of proximity, autonomy, and coexistence.

The material palette reinforces this hybrid condition. Locally quarried stone walls, standardized lightweight systems, reclaimed oak from wine barrels used for doors and furniture, and timber offcuts made available through the clearing of a nearby forest bring together different technological registers, material memories, and available resources. Local labor and its knowledge of timber construction were decisive in defining a small additional dwelling for the caretaker family, conceived as a structure capable of being optimized and expanded over time.

DETAILS

Use

Housing

Type

Rural building

Area

240 m²

Location

Sisga, Cundinamarca – Colombia

Meters above the sea level

2760

Average annual temperature

12.2 °C

Year

2007 – 2008

Design and construction

Yemail Architecture (Oficina Informal) + Carlos Picón (Master Builder)

Project team

Antonio Yemail + Michel Pineda

Production

Ana María Zuluaga

Metal structure

Benjamin Gonzalez

Photo Credits

Mateo Pérez

Categories: Housing