Achio House

Achio House

San Jose, Costa Rica / 1996 – 2000

Achio House is located in Santa Ana, San Jose, Costa Rica in the Rio de Oro residential development area, a setting comprised of modest sporadic low scale dwellings. The house sought to reconcile the various normative factors of program, site and technology to achieve a meaningful existence with its surroundings. Propriety of form is motivated by notions of inhabiting the edges, the house as filter, thresholds + layers, intervals precisely scattered. A linear translucent bar defines and screens the south edge boundary line. Periphery wall secures the property and stabilizes the geometry of the site. The ground plan of the house is set in oblique orientation to the site and touches the North boundary wall. This condition forms three distinct exterior spaces, reconciles the plan to the property, and recalls immediate and distant views of the context. Achio House negotiates between interior/exterior activity without compromising the basic premise of shelter and interiority. Large operable panels demarcate thresholds. They reason an exchange of inside / outside, a dissolution of boundary, a disintegration of plan. Skylight impels a luminous threshold. Red volume amplifies North / South threshold. Yellow volume considers privacy, aloof detachment and observation of context. Bridge / balcony tangent line mediates between edifices of solid and void.