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Lodging in Artillery Hill, Valparaiso

Part 2 Project 2002
Esteban Alvarado
Tan Szue Hann
University of Valparaiso Valparaiso | Chile
The project is a building, that we preferred to call A BIG HOUSE, with a lodging destiny for passengers and foreign students. For this, the building has 21 living spaces of double and triple height, well equiped with beds and stateroom, folded and piled to walls so as to multiply space if there is a need. The capacity varies from 4 to 14 people.

In each of this spaces there is an inner hollow that is priviledged over a full ocupation of all the stories.

As a reference of the architectonical space: Ozefrant house and ville Laroche Jeanneret by Le Corbusier, the Sea Ranche by CH. Moor and the and the principles of habitability for housing agroupations by Eduardo Vargas.

The general program organized on three yards ordered on the first floor , where its possible to make events, parties, meetings.
A second scale with “balcony-places” that are specific articulations of this dwellings and half heights of this building.

Finally there are little waiting rooms to the rooms in sectors that can be so called closed porch not only in the inner but in the outer part as well. The organization of the routes structure as a belt conveyor that goes from the first floor to the roof terrace, touching one of the nine models in two points in a way that each has two or three living spaces, located next to a central yard, that developes a stair that goes through every store.

Esteban Alvarado
Tan Szue Hann


The project “Lodging in Artillery Hill, Valparaiso”, is the materialization of a study about the creative process in architecture.

Due to this, the value of this study is focused in how WORDS,SKETCHES, MODELS, VIDEO IMAGES ANS GEOMETRIC TRACES have a material weight that allow us to make relations between them and the concrete architectonic space.

This project had an initial premise that was to contribute with a renovation of the old downtown starting from its own architectonic qualities and conditions. The deteriored residential surroundings were chosen with buildings thar are morphologically big cubes placed on highly pendented land. This generates stairs, narrow streets that form a sort of labyrinth between this hughe cubs.

From the creative process can be named at least four fields of investigation:
a. Literature and city images that lead us to definitions of ideas about labyrinth and ways of living- the space.
b. Sketches from real urban situations that allow us to precisely define themes and comprehend the architectonic light.
c. Research on a geometric matrix that gives us a way of developing the idea and its spatial materializatiion through models.
d. Study of a program with self conditions given in an urban and architectonical space.

2002
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