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House for poetry

Part 2 Project 2000
Hernán Ascui Fernández
University of the Bio Bio | Chile
In the mouth of the Bio Bio River in Concepcion, the peaceful waters coming from the mountains meet those coming from the mighty ocean waves. The great river bank leaves the city behind to join the shore just behind a lonely hill at the end of the beach.
It is in this place,the top of the hill, which I have named ‘the water confines’, where nature’s force is revealed with such intensity that it transports human beings to a poetic state.
For this reason, I propose to create a house for poetry—where poets may stay in this ultimate place before vastness.
To start the design, I went to the only place where the river bank meets the shore. I marked with stakes the four points that enable us to join the two hill tops by means of straight lines.
The project consists in building a great edge where everything gets together and, just under it, open the ground with a reinforced concrete enveloping structure having many folds. In this way, the empty space is formed waiting for the word to be created.



Hernan’s project is the result of a highly personal search for conceiving an architecture closely related to the place and the poet’s activity.
Both the proposal for the project’s theme and the manner of intervening the place originate from a long process of observation. In this way Hernan creates a project conceived from the place and from the word once he has found a name for this place. His strong commitment to the place makes him perform a foundational act, which establishes the magnitude of this project and its manner of relating both sides of the hill.
Its enormous value resides in his manner of conceiving a non-usual architecture that expresses the essential condition that man has to inhabit the earth.


2000
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