Retreat In Nocaima
RETREAT IN NOCAIMA
Obreval
ARCHITECTS
Obreval
ARCHITECT IN CHARGE
Pablo Zarama
PHOTOGRAPHS
Par Fotógrafos, Ivan Ortiz Ponce
AREA
80 m²
YEAR
2024
LOCATION
Nocaima, Colombia
CATEGORY
Houses
English description provided by the architects.
Located among the lush, rolling hills of Nocaima, Colombia, this small dwelling offers a contemporary, thoughtful, and sensitive reinterpretation of traditional rural architecture.
The project revisits vernacular elements such as bamboo, sloping roofs, and open corridors, transforming them into intentional architectural resources that, while honoring their cultural, material, and environmental origins, also question them and establish new relationships with the landscape and climate.
The conventional rural roof is redefined through a distinctive butterfly-shaped covering that collects and channels rainwater, integrating sustainability as an intrinsic part of the building's aesthetic expression, environmental performance, and spatial identity.
This gesture not only reinterprets a familiar typology but also establishes a poetic and technical dialogue between structure, technology, and nature, allowing the architecture to be both receptive and expressive.
The structural system further reinforces this synthesis: columns composed of four intertwined bamboo stems—a small tribute to Mies van der Rohe—are anchored by black steel bases, merging craftsmanship with refined technological sensibility.
The result is a spatial structure that embodies tradition, lightness, precision, and contemporary detail.
Through these reinterpretations, the house becomes an artifice—a human construction that exalts its natural surroundings, cultural memory, and material honesty.
It stands as a quiet but radical proposal for contemporary rural life in Colombia: rooted, sustainable, and architecturally visionary.
