oficina ídem mimics aging mountain house in ecuador with its casa cíclope

contemporary and timeless: replicating graceful decay

Ecuador-based studio Oficina Ídem takes the mountainous region of Cotopaxi to build its ‘Casa Cíclope,’ the Cyclops House. The design of the house was informed by the team’s early visits to the site, which revealed a trend of ‘deformations’ among local buildings that have developed due to climatic conditions across time. The architects explain: ‘Our observations lead us to define the presence of something attached to the local people’s way of living which we needed to transmit.’

The site visit inspired the architects to fold the house onto itself ‘as if time would define its existence by the possibility of the house’s eventual collapse.’ The architecture is intended to ‘decay gracefully,’ appearing as if it had existed on the site for so long that it had ‘already begun its decay process.’

casa cíclope: a house with one eye

The team of architects at Oficina Ídem celebrate the beauty of the natural surroundings by organizing the Casa Cíclope as a sequence of transparencies and opacities. With the mountains beyond and a close hill nearby, the apertures are laid out to comprehend the ‘distant and the close,’ framing moments of landscape that create a ‘narrative of coincidences.’

In the center of the space, a large ‘periscope’ gazes directly at a moment in the landscape, introducing ‘time and light’ into the interiors. The architects continue: ‘The interior then made the landscape appear and not the other way around.‘

Oficina Ídem’s ‘house as a creature’

Oficina Ídem continues to define the spirit of its Casa Cíclope: ‘The project resulted in a solid defined by several types of dissimilar elements /or fixations/ such as the mask placed in the entrance ramp which reminded us of the ephemeral condition of local houses enclosures, the platform that extends the main room to the distant hill or the periscope that sometimes works as a lighthouse for visitors up in the mountain. It was constructed by local craftsmen who developed the project through everyday techniques and local skills with steel, and locally sourced materials such as charred cypress wood, concrete blocks and concrete.

‘In the final stages of construction, we started to think of it as a creature rather than a house.’