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The Forest Airport

Part 1 Project 2009
Andrea Vallejos
Aileen Steinman
Angelo Roco
Jessica Ortloff
University of Chile | Chile
The Forest Airport
The place where accommodates the project, City of Temuco, Araucanía region, is characterized by its lush forests that flood mountains and hills filling the landscape. For this reason, the biggest challenge at the time of creating a proposal for airport was the way in which this natural landscape would be affected with a metal structure that would conflict with ambience saturated materials in natural state such as wood. This is how born the idea of using these beautiful forests, as configuration main: "the tree", main metaphor of the structure of the airport. As a starting point we take the structure of a real forest, taking their distances and making them consistent with the program and the material being used. The metaphor of the forest referred to use trunks and branches, as pillars and beams respectively, thus shaping a structural system which underpins the entire building. The cover design refer to the foliage of trees and thus achieve the same light as is input as a real forest clearings letting in the light on the internal spatial forest. This captures the effect of leaf shadows on the floor of the airport.
Finally the great objective of the airport is inserting in a natural context, without notoriously affect the landscape, making that this comes into mimesis with natural forests.

Andrea Vallejos
Aileen Steinman
Angelo Roco
Jessica Ortloff


The project made for contest CAP 2009, by the students of 8° semester, was chosen like one of the projects to represent the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Chile in this competition.
The values that caused that the project was chosen are in their creativity where the proposal makes an analogy to the forest of the south of the country. The structure of the building is conceived by porches of steel that create an inner spatiality of great wealth through elements that symbolize steel trees. This structure this formed by normal pieces that when being united with others they form an artificial forest abstractly.
The zone of the first level appears in double height, and is the place of arrival of passengers of the city; in this place it is where the trees appear with all their force.
In the second level, it is located the zone of boarding, which balconies the first floor. Through small breaks covers allows the entrance of natural light and are valued elements that may be considered the "branches" of the tree.
The development of the project like the expression of him, is of great value, standing out the conception of the proposal.
The examining commission selected this project by the search and innovation of the use of the steel, considering especially the conditions in the area with an adequate response to the program of an airport.

Tutor(s)

2009
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