Articles by Javier Gaete

This proposal is a renovation of an existing store, for the settlement of a Medical-Esthetical Clinic – “Corporación Dermoestética”. The existing space is integrated on a building which, as many surrounding ones, is from the 60’s and 70’s. The urban front of the street where it’s located – Av. António Augusto de Aguiar – has very homogeneous housing constructions with commercial purposes on the ground floor. It was urgent to keep and emphasize this homogeneity and the introduction of good quality commercial spaces was the way to ensure it.

This was the second “Low Cost House Series” project, sponsored by Korea Child Fund to improve a living environment for low-income families. The house was situated in a small rural village of Jangheung town in southeastern province of Korean peninsula and was a home for a family of parents and five children. It was a very old and shabby building tilted to a side and stood right next to an unused cow house filled with the remains of cow waste attracting all sorts of flies and bugs. The surroundings were filthy, and the smell was appalling. However, the worst part of the house was ‘rats’, which literally occupied the whole building. It was the family who had to avoid the rats and find their own spaces. The rats were unafraid of men, and their exact numbers were never to be known. As such, an open outside toilet without walls was the least problem to the family. To them, this horrible living situation was somewhat regarded as something they had to live by.

The aim was to act respecting the current volumes of this old house, located close to the river in the village of Noutigos. Maintaining the stone facade, replacing the original windows in chestnut wood, we just only propose two new small and strategic openings in the south wall for their views and the natural light needed for specific locations. The new openings with iron frame and fixed glass contrast with the existing ones and which are treated with a chestnut wood.

A couple from the Caribbean seek retreat amid the northern Andes in a small town, two hours north of Quito, an orchard site in a valley 2470 meters above sea level, between the Imbabura and Cotacachi mountains, to the east and west respectively. The couple needs a design proposal in 4 days before going home, or they will sell the site: we have to design a house without knowing the site and after meeting the couple for two hours.

This was a project to restore an old sixteenth-century palatial mansion, which was in ruins and had undergone major renovations and alterations over time, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Two renowned Chinese painters decide to move to the outskirts of Beijing to the artist village Songzhuang in order to live and work in the quiet countryside and in the neighborhood of many fellow artists. The design for the studio houses departs from the traditional Chinese Courtyard House Type – not so much in terms of its representation or construction principles, but more in terms of aspects of its spatial performance, namely shelter (shielded outdoor space within the structure and figure), introversion (all openings open towards the inside, not towards the street), degrees of privacy (gradated levels of privacy through the succession of courtyards), orientation (main living spaces with south orientation). These are examined and translated into an architectural Prototype that reconciled 3 different juxtapositions: the inside and the outside, the working and the living, the individual and the collective.

A second home on a rocky outcrop at the start of the western ghats (highlands),Khopoli, in Maharashtra, India. An area of high precipitation in the monsoons, and equal heat during the summers, the site changes remarkably from March to July, with the onset of the south westerly monsoons. Basalt the local black rock of the region is what this site was about.