Greenhouse House 23
GREENHOUSE HOUSE 23
Yemail Arquitectura
ARCHITECTS
Yemail Arquitectura
LEAD ARCHITECT
Antonio Yemail
DESIGN TEAM
Daniel Molina
MANUFACTURERS
LA CORONA CARPINTERIA METALICA SAS
ENGINEERING AND CONSULTING > OTHER
Mauricio Velázquez
PHOTOGRAPHS
Bé estudio, Paola Pabón & Santiago Beaumé
AREA
51 m²
YEAR
2025
LOCATION
La Calera, Colombia
CATEGORY
Houses, Adaptive Reuse
English description provided by the architects.
There is a moment when construction and demolition look identical.
Sometimes, that concrete image—suspended between absence and the promise of the future—becomes a guide for physical intervention.
If we strip away the symbolic sense of violence it sometimes imposes on its site, a ruin can also be understood as a material and temporal inventory.
In this rehabilitation, we pursued the virtue of what still feels firm, using an intuitive approach that was almost an act of faith: filling in what was left vacant, and re-equipping resources starting precisely where everything had ended.
The goal was to reveal the traceability between eras and to vindicate the act of repairing, even when using parts already considered "obsolete."
In this high-mountain forest, on the remains of a former school, sits the structure of a greenhouse: a gesture of connection to the rural landscape and of resistance against time.
Archaeology can be the variable that balances the equation between different eras. For architecture, it is a way of thinking that allows us to escape the trap of replacement—the impulse to always start from scratch.
In the mountains of La Calera, we sought to read the preexistence as a torrent of tangible memory, a current inviting us to recognize the traces of the past, even those that were once merely ground.
Architecture is born from this desire: to illuminate the shadow of the past and imagine future ways of living.
We adopted the greenhouse typology as a way to restore a ruin, treating it as a lightweight, almost temporary piece that sits on the site to extend the lifespan of what was already there.
The glass box acts as a mediator between two eras: between material and climate, between what once was and what is growing back.
Special thanks to Ángela and her family, José Fernando Cáceres, Daniel Molina, and the entire team at Yemail Arquitectura.
