Architectural photographer Cristobal Palma has sent us another set of photos from South America, this time of a project in Chile that is a mixture of cave, house and tent.

Wall House, architects by FAR frohn&rojas, has four "delaminated" structural layers: a cave-like concrete core; an outer ring of shelving; a "soft skin" of polycarbonate panels and finally a fabric membrane.

More photos plus plans and drawings to come. Update: see more photos here, here and here plus if you'd like to build the Wall House, the architects have made the plans available for sale.

>> see more of Cristobal Palma's architectural photos in our previous posts: Plasma Studio "parasite in South Tyrol;
Indigo Hotel by architect Sebastián Irarrazaval; Deck House by Assadi and Pulido

Below is a brief description from the architects:

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WALL HOUSE, Santiago de Chile (2004-2007)
 Suburban residence

As opposed to the general notion that our living environments can be properly described and designed “in plan", this project is a design investigation into how the qualitative aspects of the wall, as a complex membrane, structure our social interactions and climatic relationships and enable specific ecologies to develop.

The project breaks down the “traditional" walls of a house into a series of four delaminated layers (concrete cave, stacked shelving, milky shell, soft skin) in between which the different spaces of the house slip. From the inside out the layers build upon one another, both materially and geometrically, blurring the boundary between the interior and the exterior and creating, through the specificity of the different materials used (many of which are not common in architectural applications), a series of qualitatively distinct environments.

The building's most standout feature, an energy screen typically used in greenhouse construction, constitutes the outermost layer, creating not only a diffused lighting and comfortably climatized zone inside but also, through its folding and sometimes reflective/sometimes-translucent surface, contributes to the diamond-cut appearance of the structure.

FAR frohn&rojas
 project team: Marc Frohn, Mario Rojas Toledo, Amy Thoner, Pablo Guzman, Isabel Zapata

Update 05/07/2007: more photos of this project in our latest post