White surface on landscape. Casa Pájaro de Plata by OsArquitectura

Description of the project by OsArquitectura

The house is located at the top of the mountain of a remote village in Playa Negra, Costa Rica.  It is a vacation home designed for a New Yorker couple that were interested in having a dwelling far from their own house, and they wanted not only a place that suits well with its environment but a design that becomes the main instrument to understand the surrounded. 

The house is inspired by the local vernacular constructions of the area that are inserted in what Gilles Clément calls the third landscape; taking advantage and enhancing the natural conditions of a place.

The most notable features of the project are its ambition to embrace the entire plot and therefore the project uses an exploited architectural plan. The fragments of the architectural plan are connected by sets of terraces that show traces of a Mesoamerican past; the roofs of the structures try to stretch between them to the point where their materiality becomes translucent, both metaphorically and literally.

The house is large but also small, the roof is large but also light.

Its absence of glass, filtration of natural light, and play with the wind, do not allow the separation between the house and its landscape. It is a house that is sensitive to the guidelines defined and dictated by the plot. Although it is a response to this era and does not fail to satisfy its global position.