Colaborators Alejandro Beals (Chile)/(China)
Construction Comp.
Engineers Patricio Stagno (Chile)/(China)
Construction date 2004 - 2005
Completion date 2005
Superficie de terreno/terrain surface 4564 m²
Built surface 401 m²
Location Foshou Lake, Nanjing, China
Landscape design EKISTICS Town Planning Inc.

The project of CIPEA House (Chinese International Practical Exhibition of Architecture) is located in the Foshou Lake, in the suburbs of Nanjing, China. Forms part of programmed exhibition for the year a 2005 in which 20 architects participate, Chinese and foreign, whom will have to build a house each one, in addition to a Hotel and Convention center. The general project is led by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki and is located in a natural environment of forests, bamboos, tea plantations, lagoons and outcrops of water.

The specific site for this house has a smooth slope and is delimited by a stream and a forest in all the South side, by a way of circumvallation by the North sides and the west, and by another land in its east sides.

At a first moment the house will be part of the architecture exhibition, reason why it must have a circuit that allows to cross it, integrating the visitor with the natural environment that surround it, along with lodging the own program of a house, considering that that will be its use in a near future.

The project is solved in three levels, parallels to the stream and the forest. In the level of the land, defined by the structural supports, parking is located and a room of machines. These supports suspend the main flat to the height of the cup of the trees.

The main level has five rooms built as wood boxes that are located by way of independent cubicles that articulate distance traveled and zones of public activities, obtaining different views of the land and of the trees to the extent that the project travels through itself. The interior and the outside are confused in the eagerness of introducing nature in the different spaces of the house.

The floor is of travertino marble and the sky of concrete seen. The baths associated to the dormitories are volumes of glass, illuminated by reflections, originating of louver windows that will be in the cover under the water.

The ceiling terrace is a reservoir of 30 centimeters of depth, transforming the plan of cover in a garden of aquatic plants, with points of detention since which is possible to observe the distant landscape.

The project of CIPEA House intends to integrate and interact with its natural surroundings, generating different observing points as it is crossed and they inhabit each one of its spaces, losing the notion of inside and outside, and the one of the distribution runner, generating a continuous space that articulate, Integrate and distribute.