Greenhouse Atelier / al bordE

Architect: al bordE / Pascual Gangotena
Location: Machachi, Ecuador
Client: Iñigo Salvador
Technical Advisor: Bolívar Romero, Rammed Earth Specialist
Builder: al bordE, Pascual Gangotena & Miguel Ramos
Infographics: al bordE, David Barragán & Esteban Benavides
Constructed Area: 61.95 sqm
Design Year: 2006
Building Year: 2007
Photographs: Pascual Gangotena & Iñigo Salvador

He requires a shelter to express the powerful reflection of nature in his paintings. In the other hand. She needs a greenhouse to summarize the diversity of that nature. He is the foundation of the family. She is tenderness, passion and hope.

atelier floor plan

An atelier, a place for inspiration and meditation for him, a bubble for observing and painting the surrounding landscape. Meanwhile, this workshop becomes a pedestal on which her greenhouse is placed. It collects a selection of flora and becomes a place to contemplate the endless landscape.

Two environments contained in crystal membranes: the atelier one rises from a base of ground and stone toward the vegetation space and sky. The greenhouse sits on the heavy mass of the workshop and flies through clouds and moorland wind.

The atelier is a bubble suspended between stone walls and rammed earth. The existing space between walls, ground and bubble, protect the space from absorbing the humidity of the moorland. Additionally the first sun rays heat a radiator system that increase the temperature of the air gap. This heated air enters the space making it thermally comfortable. In the afternoon the main façade absorbs the sun heat, saving it in the solid floor of the workshop releasing the heat during the night.

greenhouse floor plan

The upper box, otherwise, just fulfills its role as greenhouse.

The project is located in a rural zone of Machachi, in a hard access site, over 3.500 meters over sea level. So the appropriate decision was to use principally materials of the place: ground, stone, pine and eucalypt wood.