Nine Skylights House
The Nine Skylights House on Cabras Island is located in front of the small town of Hornopirén, surrounded by mountains, rivers, and evergreen forests.
With a rainy climate and pristine nature, it serves as the gateway to the Carretera Austral and Northern Patagonia.
To reach the island, one must navigate for 20 minutes through the Llancahué fjord. Although the island is private and uninhabited, people live on the surrounding islands, making it common to see or hear multiple motorboats navigating the fjord’s channels.
Given the isolation and remoteness, we opted for a construction approach based on simple logics and basic instructions, anticipating a high level of entropy in the information that could be generated from our drawing board.
This was due to both the limited capacity to oversee the project periodically (it takes over eight hours to reach the island from Santiago) and the low technical expertise of the construction team involved.
Finding a suitable site for the house required considering not only the aesthetic enjoyment of seeing and being seen but also safety against wind, storm surges, and potential waterspouts. We had to compromise from a sunlit northern slope to a shaded southern slope to ensure greater security and peace of mind for the client. Thus, we chose a small elevated forest clearing a few meters above the sea
with the mountain at its back, facing south.
The general architectural concept consisted of two simple single-level volumes connected by a continuous linear circulation that, by its very location in the floor plan, organizes the use, proportions and, therefore, the possible program. The volume closest to the access would contain the public areas, while the next one would house the private spaces. Each programmatic element--living room, dining
room, kitchen, bedrooms, and bathrooms--would have its own skylight, addressing the lack of direct natural light due to the house's location and turning what could have been considered a difficulty, into a defining attribute of the project. Additionally, the skylights in the public sector segment the open-plan
space by modifying the height and intensity of the light cone, thus eliminating the need for partition walls.
In this way, we understood that the inconvenience of a necessarily conservative site choice, could generate the overall design concept of the house: a formal response to the site’s lack of sunlight.
