A modest structure integrated into its surroundings

At the bottom of the Andes Mountains is an incredibly beautiful shop house immersed in the middle of a grove of elms, located on the outskirts of the city of Santiago, Chile. Designed by Parra + Edwards Architects, Apollo 11 was given its name because it is designed like a ship that landed in a forest without touching it at any time and will undertake its departure, leaving the forest intact. “Apollo 11″ also for the laboratory conditions: This house functions as architecture workshop, recording studio and rehearsal room acoustic and electric music. It is a capsule that supports in full the life of his crew, a family of architects and musicians.

The program has been organized into two levels from a rectangular 6 x 9 meters in 6 meters high. The rectangle, for the Japanese is the only element that does not distort the nature, is a clean element that tends to disappear. The simplicity of the box also helps the idea of occupying the forest floor minimum while maximizing the heat inside the ship as it landed in a place that is very cold in winter. With two levels of heating is easy and is oriented in their bedrooms to the north with large windows that take the stored heat energy and heat through the glass. In summer the foliage of the elms control acts as natural sunlight.

The box is a simple grid structure coated metal plates on their skin for plywood of 18 mm. glass plates and allowing full and empty that resemble the dark and light fragments produced in the foliage of trees. The skeleton of this structure is always visible, with the metal profiles metaphor from the trunks and branches of this new forest and wood planes of the leaves of the tree. That’s why their facades are indefinite and change in different seasons of the year through mobile web pages are the thermal checked in and out depending on what is happening in the forest itself. Via

Visit the website of Parra + Edwards Architects here.

From the Web: