Raised on a platform that negotiates the slope of the terrain, the house is envisioned as a shelter amid nature in Conguillío National park, in Chile’s La Araucanía region. From the terrace one can contemplate the dead river of lava that is a reminder of the last eruption, in 2008, of the Llaima Volcano.

An exercise in repetition, the project involved reconstructing two already existing structures: the Prisma House in Yamanashi (Japan), built by Kazuo Shinohara in 1974, and the Terrace Room in Chiloé (Chile), carried out by Smiljan Radic himself in 1997. This more recent Radic work took the Japanese bulding’s exquisite diagonal timber support and its famous lateral facade, an isosceles triangle resting on the ground. It also took the 7.20-meter structural section, but cuts its length from 10.80 to 7.20 meters. In this way, the volume’s height is equal to both its width and its length, coming close to Shinohara’s ideal as expressed in the framing of his photographs. From the Terrace Room came the galvanized steel frame whose section is an isoceles triangle, delimiting a large pointed space under the roof, but the dimensions are now altered to adapt to the size of the neighboring piece...[+]