in chile, pezo von ellrichshausen’s ‘raem house’ surrounds a sunlit courtyard
a hidden garden in rural chile
Sitting on a gentle slope, overlooking distant vineyards on a narrow valley, Pezo von Ellrichshausen‘s Raem House is opens up with a large, interior courtyard. This is a hidden room that contains a dry garden, some boulders and rainwater. It is partially covered by four curved slabs, each one of them supported by a bold central column.
The house takes shape as a plinth within Chile‘s rural area of Curacavi. Without any predominant direction from within, the lateral sequence of narrow rooms is withdrawn to the back and slightly buried into the natural terrain to promote an asymmetrical mediation with it.
images by Pezo von Ellrichshausen
inside pezo von ellrichshausen’s raem house
The Raem House was designed by the architects at Pezo von Ellrichshausen with ‘a subtle compensation in size and proportion.’ The lineal distribution of the domestic program, even its reversible end-point condition, is always tangential to the centrality of the courtyard. This larger room, half covered by deep shadows, is an outdoor living space with punctual openings in every side.
Depending on the position of the sliding glass panels, the opacity of the cardinal projections is blocked by the mirage of another courtyard. Beyond this illusionary domain, the horizontal format of the house stands as a solitary abstract figure, with a seemingly organic void, but without a definite scale. The reinforced concrete construction, with its yellow pigmentation, appears as a monolithic plate amidst broken stones and native bushes.
