A contemporary cabin. Xecua House by Yemail Arquitectura

Project description by Yemail Arquitectura

A cabin stands on the edge of a hill overlooking the Cota Valley, a municipality in the Bogotá savannah, at an altitude of 2,566 meters above sea level. The house finds its origin in the story of another built in 2007 in Sisga, which served as the founding project of our office: a butterfly-cut cabin built with the edges discarded by sawyers when cutting down a pine forest. The vocation to do without the unnecessary is the common thread that connects the questions of then with those of now, and as a whole with that appreciation of primitive life that is in the promise of inhabiting a cabin.

The house is located in front of a body of forest that protects it from the winds that come down from the east and extends in an orthogonal volume oriented towards the west and the distant views. The undulation of the terrain dictates that the greatest care is to be raised on stilts.


Xecua House by Yemail Arquitectura. Photograph by Mateo Perez.

The spaces are concentrated in a molded bar with actions that define the interior comfort and the relationship with the most immediate floor. At the ends, the bedrooms end in boxes that contain the closets, providing privacy and depth to the modulated wooden windows, which owe a lot to Japanese architecture.

In the middle, the living room, dining room and kitchen meet, extending like a box on an exterior deck that floats at the most sloped point and offers a visual conversation between the interior and the changing weather of the landscape. Between the living room and the master bedroom a small ritual is celebrated with the passage through a corridor that cuts the volume, refined with the presence of the canopy of Chinese acacia trees framed by the east and a desk contained between the resulting patio. The gabled volume with eaves at the ends is redefined by the anomaly of a double-height cylinder in exposed brick that gravitates with another weight and gives root to the lightness of the wooden box. It also articulates the entrance with the transition through the lobby, hiding a warehouse against the ground.


Xecua House by Yemail Arquitectura. Photograph by Mateo Perez.

The cabin is a kind of reverence towards the natural world and, from there, towards the materials of the built world. The annealed clay on the roof tiles reflects the copper hues in the sunset, while the interior Tecumani pine trusses are displayed between white walls that know how to reflect their shadow.

«this particular handling of materials, not in the artisanal sense, but in its intellectual appreciation, has always been present in the modern movement, and has undoubtedly been something known, what is new is that it finds its closest affinities not "in an architectural style from the past, but in traditional peasant housing forms, but which are never fashionable: a poetics without rhetoric."

The Smithsons.

The spirit of the materials is manifested thanks to the hands of Master Arbey, who knows like no one else the material from which this mountain is made.