20×20 House
Published by misha in Chile, Chillin, Relaxing, Resorts, South America, Travel Stories, Villas
This is a superb, undreamed, very discriminating house. The house is created by Felipe Assadi and Francisca Pulido. The idea and design of this amazing house were the construction of a guests house and house of games.
In the house there’re two bedrooms, each one with bathroom, one kitchen/bar and a visits bathroom, plus a living area, a pool table and a games table.
The house is situated in Calera de Tango, commune of Chile and have a maximum area of 100 square metres.
One interesting feature of ‘20×20′ is that the house is raised over piles at 80sm height over the natural land.The house is round of a glass volume, through which is possible to follow the trees, while the house was not in use. For the remaining walls the choice was a black colour that is easily absorbed within its context. So nature and time were left in charge of limiting the space contained by the crystal box.
This house have a square ground plan. A the centre of the house was placed the games room and to the west, protected by a one-metre thick blind wall the outdoors dining room, in a yard that crosses the full volume from South to North, direction of the predominant winds that air the house in summer.
The kitchen, bar and visits bathroom were arranged in a core that forms a wall-furniture that additionally splits the dormitories from the living room.
The ceremonial Men’s House is the sacred dwelling of the initiated men and of the spirits. This kind of building is found in many cultures of Oceania, but those of the Middle Sepik are the most elaborate from an aesthetic viewpoint. Called tambaran, these constructions can reach 25 metres in length and exceed 18 metres in height. They occupy a central position in the villages and are built in the area reserved for ceremonies. The Men’s House is usually built on two levels. On the ground floor it is surrounded by large sculpted poles, decorated with totem symbols, and it is divided into spaces with hearths, each of which is assigned to a single clan. Here also are the huge slit drums, the small stools and the hooks sculpted and painted with anthropomorphic illustrations, which are hung from the beams to hold the food baskets. Access to the upper floor is by stairs with heavily decorated posts. One or two seated figures with open legs support the roof beams. The entrance to the upper floor is between the legs of the figure portraying the female or male ancestor in which the mythical theme of the transmutation of a human being into crocodile is iconographically portrayed. This second level of the house is also divided among the clans and sometimes it contains a space reserved for the initiated. The treasures of the clans are preserved on this floor: the great sacred flutes used during ceremonies and the skulls of the ancestors and of the enemies which are exhibited on painted panels or hung from the beams with the anthropomorphic hooks. As a whole the Men’s House represents primordial woman. The façade is her face and the building represents her body. In this way, all that belongs to men, that is to say the public, cultural and ceremonial sphere, is placed inside the body of a woman, so that the male/female conflict is overcome by a more profound integration between the two sexes. The ceremonial objects were collected in the area of the Sepik in the first two decades of the 20th century by Padre Kirschbaum S.V.D. and they were donated to Pope Pius XI in 1928.
