Taller Héctor Barroso, Entrepinos

From the arrival area, raised above the overall settlement, the houses can be seen in their sequence like materic, earthy geometric solids, almost without openings and marked by the ‘hollow’ of the staircases contained by the high two-story masonry.

The staircases erode the corners of the constructions at various points, revealing the sequence of the steps in their lower projection, transforming what is usually a ‘leftover’ space under the stairs into an effective, precise abstract figure. The single-family houses have an area of 340 square meters and are identically repeated in the design solution.

Each one is composed of six monolithic room-blocks, almost as if to reproduce the clay working model, with one or two stories gathered around a central patio. The houses turn their backs – with solid walls – to the dirt access road to the north, to guarantee privacy and to reduce the loss of internal heat.

From this standpoint, the southern front of each construction has large windows that offer fine views of the landscape while bringing abundant light into the interiors, catching the local breeze to bring natural ventilation.

During the winter months, these openings take advantage of the sunlight for passive heating, as part of an overall approach of sustainability that includes the use of thermal mass for cooling, and direct heating supplied by two large wood-burning stoves.

Thermal mass (or thermal inertia) means the capacity of a material to prevent the passage of warmth, storing some of it, while keeping the temperature of internal spaces homogeneous, constant and comfortable, in spite of big variations in outdoor temperature.

This principle is a matter of application of materials, in this case bricks for the load-bearing walls, natural stone for the floors, wood for the ceiling beams and most of the custom furnishings (also salvaged from the few pines that had to be felled to make room for the houses), and local earth from the excavations.

The brick walls have been treated with a sort of veiled stucco created with this earth: “We experimented with more red, less red, trying different quantities of cement,” Barroso says, and the resulting mix has been applied to the walls by hand, obtaining a soft, irregular texture for both the interiors and the exterior surfaces.