Architect Joan Puigcorbé / PAAS
Collaborator Carolina Pizarro
Interior Design and Furniture MKBstudio
Photographer Jordi Miralles
Construction PAAS
Electrical Systems JUNG / Tecno CR
Lighting BSV electronic
Toilet fixtures ROCA / Materia Prima CR
Location San José – Costa Rica
Year 2015
Total Plot Area 1.320m2 (14.203 sq ft)
Total Built Area 652m2 (7.011 sq ft)
Bedrooms 4
Guest bedroom 1
Service area office / service bedroom / laundry
Features Jacuzzi / Swimming Pool / BBQ
Garage Spaces 3
Structure Steel framing
Floor finish 25mm natural wood "melina"

Plans / Sketches

INOUT House

From the architect:
This house establishes an uninterrupted ¨inside-outside¨ relationship; a sequence of layers between the open and the intermediary. Frontal boundaries are blurred by sheets of glass and vegetation, framed by two horizontal planes, floor and ceiling, where the full and the void are related via a series of matter, water, vegetation and sky. Lateral boundaries establish the ¨full-void¨ relationship via a series of solid materials that close transversal views.

All bedrooms are arranged along the peripheries bordering the neighbors, leaving an intermediate space between volumes for social uses: kitchen-dining, living room, swimming pool, porch and barbecue.

Existing trees remain, uncompromisingly piercing the spaces they occupy.

A perimeter curtain of rope and vegetation delineates the limits of the building element, creating a gap of shadow / light that qualifies a space between.

A single material, Melina wood, dresses the inside and the outside. The apparatus varies: the outside is expressed as a relief while the inside is softened.

The kitchen table and the kitchen itself shapes a sculptural floor that presides over the social zone. The black gloss of the Absolute Black granite dematerializes, through its reflections, the gesture of formal forcefulness.

This house responds to the existing features of the landscape and reveals new dimensions of the topography of place. In its formalization and materiality, the experience of light, shadow, earth, water and air is intensified. The general form is readily readable and fluid in its articulation of space.

Joan Puigcorbé, PAAS

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