Get the best of Domus straight to your inbox!

Hostal Ritoque

With conceptual concerns for good, low-cost architecture, Alejandro Soffia and Gabriel Rudolphy designed this hostel in Valparaiso selecting local technologies and labour.

If we define luxury as Bruno Munari does, we realize that, in general, high-level architectural production is associated with improper use of costly materials, which produce an equality gap to the extent that the benefits of good design can only be taken advantage of by those that can afford it.

Likewise, and in order to bring design closer to a larger percentage of the population, Alejandro Soffia and Gabriel Rudolphy have been working for some time to improve the relation between design quality and cost.

To accomplish this, they started from the hypothesis that rational construction should define the laws of design and, therefore, they have opted to design projects that optimize the material conditions of building systems that are low-cost and technologically simple. Capitalizing on the dimensional properties of construction materials allows to take advantage of materials so as to reduce the times and costs involved in a work of architecture.

In the case of Hostal Ritoque, the conceptual concerns for good, low-cost design coincided with the equilibrium point between the client’s wishes and his budget. As often happens in Chile, wishes were lofty and budget tight. While it’s normal for industry outsiders to be unfamiliar with building costs, everyone expects the investment of their life’s work to meet all of the expectations their imagination can come up with. So, in order to reduce costs and because the project was located in a rural area, the project began by selecting local technologies and labour.

Alejandro Soffia and Gabriel Rudolphy, Hostal Ritoque, Playa de Ritoque, Quintero, Región de Valparaíso, Chile. Photo © Juan Durán Sierralta

In other words, the architects contacted the “tradesman” responsible for the construction typology in the area – simple architecture of sawn pine timber – and they created a catalogue of construction techniques based on the most common local solutions. This decision allowed to reduce transportation costs and construction profit margins. The second key aspect consisted of optimizing the dimensions of the most common length of wood. This measurement is defined as the width of the way of the different volumes that compromise the project. This decision in itself produced no savings but added value of adjusting spaces to a greater measurement than that of most constructive elements (2.4 m) did.

Hostal Ritoque is located in the far north end of the beach of the same name, where in the 70’s was developed the “Open City” of the Valparaiso School. The layout was divided into 5 independent volumes: three for two-story bays, one for service areas with common spaces and one apartment for the owner. They are each distributed in the floor plan to achieve independence between them, and the best orientation towards the landscape.