Horizontal planes to generate shadows. Villa Morabeza by OsArq

Description of project by OsArq

Villa Morabeza is a holiday home in the extreme south of Playa Tamarindo located in the province of Guanacaste Costa Rica. This zone of Costa Rica belongs to an area of ​​the most arid country affected by a pronounced dry season lasting one third of the year. The flora and fauna belong to the dry tropical forest and the region in general suffers from occasional droughts and water scarcity. The house is introverted since its location does not allow for the enjoyment of exterior views more than the groves of a green area contiguous to the property in the middle of a residential development.

The house seeks to integrate spaces that are commonly individual or isolated as they would be a room, bathroom and outdoor terrace, or as it would be a room, kitchen, dining room, entrance and outdoor terrace. In this way it manages to reduce the footprint of the spaces without them feeling small and incorporating the outside to the livable spaces.

The building system of the house is non-traditional and consists of an integral structure of prefabricated profiles in cold-bent steel, this allowed a very light and flexible construction system mounted on a structural slab that allowed to explore flat roofs in a region where the norm it is to mitigate the climate and the rains with high sloping roofs.

The house uses a series of systems to minimize the consumption of energy and resources, including a treatment plant for all the water in the house, which is redistributed underground to irrigate a garden with low water consumption. It also uses a network of 114 photovoltaic panels in a cogeneration and grid power system with the local electric service company. The hot water is a hybrid system of solar panels with a backup storage with GPL gas heating in case of low solar radiation. The materials used in the house are industrial in nature and most of the house is built with cold rolled steel that is infinitely recyclable and low cost.
 
Passive design was used to obtain cross ventilation and natural lighting in all interior spaces where the social space of kitchen-living-dining room is not conditioned and opens to the outside in its four flanks.

The new construction technologies and industrial materials opened the possibility of exploring and proposing a reinterpretation of a modern architecture in the dry tropics.