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Whether a single-family house or an apartment complex, Chilean architect Cristián Izquierdo’s residential projects testify to his overriding interest in exploring the broad opportunities offered by prefabricated timber construction systems. For Izquierdo Lehmann Arquitectos, timber not only offers a deep well of architectural expressiveness, it also cuts a building’s carbon footprint, and ensures a project’s general and economic viability, thanks especially to the excellent reproducibility of wooden structures, and the advantageous ratio between a building’s structural requirements and the requisite size of timber elements. In short, for Izquierdo, prefabricated timber systems give meaning to architecture.
This conviction is applied by the architect in his main area of design interest: medium-density residential complexes. The firm’s design approach starts from the inside and moves outward, the different levels of association between the building’s occupants determining the particular configuration. By the same token, the spatial organization of the interior spaces echoes the overall construction principle chosen. At the same time, however, the various structural components are considered individually and only subsequently combined into a coherent whole.
Building typology and its construction therefore go hand in hand, and the actual construction elements configure each project’s particular distribution layout.
However, implementing these basic tenets requires a constant search for an equilibrium between giving the architectural concept underlying the project full rein and creating that rhythmic, organic quality in architecture that goes back to the temples of Ancient Greece. It is an age-old theoretical exercise that today is assisted by state-of-the art digital technology, essential for the design and production of the different timber structural components, which, in the case of a...
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