© Fernando Alda
- Architects: OsArquitectura
- Location: Los Pargos, Costa Rica
- Author Architect: John Osborne Odio
- Team: Paola Fernandez, Lucía Croccia, Adrian Guevara
- Area: 200.0 m2
- Project Year: 2014
- Photographs: Fernando Alda
- Interior Design: Sunderland Proctor
- Project Director: Melissa Araya Ramirez
- Structure: Ing. Adrian Moreno
- Elecromechanical: EM Ingenieros; Ing. Alberto Bonilla, Ing. Orlando Bazan
- Builder: INTI BUILDERS S.A.; Carlos Velarde
- Interior Surface: 200m2
- Exterior Roof Surface: 228m2
© Fernando Alda
From the architect. The House sits on a mountain top in a remote beach town called Playa Negra. It is a vacation home for a New York couple that was interested in a home away from home that not only adapted well to its surroundings but was instrumental to understanding them.
© Fernando Alda
The house takes cues from local vernacular constructions of the area which in the architect’s opinion insert themselves in what Gilles Clément calls the third landscape; going with rather than against natural conditions.
© Fernando Alda
Notable features of the project are its ambition to encompass the entire site and thus it has an exploded floor plan. The fragments of the floor plan are connected by means of land terraces that hint traces of a Mesoamerican past; its roofs attempt to stretch between structures to the point where its materiality becomes translucent.
© Fernando Alda
Ground Floor Plan
© Fernando Alda
The house is large but it is also small, the roof is big but it is also light. Its absence of glass, filtering of natural light, and play with the wind, do not allow for separation between house and its landscape.