Project Details
- Project Name
- Brazilian Embassy in Chile
- Architect
- Ossa Arquitectura
- Client/Owner
- República Federativa do Brasil
- Project Types
-
Office ,Government
- Project Scope
- New Construction
- Size
- 24,628 sq. feet
- Year Completed
- 2018
- Shared by
- Ayda Ayoubi
- Project Status
- Built
Project Description
FROM THE ARCHITECTS:
In 1872 the Italian architect Eusebio Chelli was appointed by Maximiliano Errázuriz to build one of the best houses in Santiago de Chile. Today that house is known as Palacio Errázuriz, located in the Avenida Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins (also called Alameda).
In 1941 the Brazilian Government acquired the Palacio to be the Ambassador’s residence. Then, Brazil decided to add a new building to locate there the Embassy. This new building suggests a dialogue with the Italian classicism of the Palacio, adopting its orders and rhythms. Later, the Brazilian diplomacy, in demand of more space, built another volume in 1971.
All these interventions and enlargements around the Palacio cause a lack of hierarchy in the importance of each building, causing confusion between original and copy, historic and new, public and private.
The new project is focused in drawing a limit that clearly separates the diplomatic offices from the Ambassador’s residence, the Embassy from the Palacio, also serving as a frame for the historical building. This new limit should maintain a visual permeability to allow all users to enjoy a garden that was a reference for the Chilean high society of late XIX century and beginning of XX. A skin of pine wood that dialogues with the garden, consolidates the limit, facilitating a permeability which connects inner and outer areas, thus separating the public areas of the offices from the private ones of the residence.
This wooden skin is adapted to topographical characteristics of the garden and to the position of the existing flora, unifying the new volumes built to meet the new programmatic requirements.
The geometry of the resulting limit grows in thickness to become habitable creating new spaces that qualify the edifices between their interior and exterior.
This intermediate space is a thickness in the limit, with fungible characteristics, variable and unstable, that gives parts of the garden to the interior of the offices and where the seasons and uses are changing. These patios of the limit thickness act passively in the climatic conditioning inside the offices.