Location: Provincia de Misiones, Argentina Year: 2024 Architects: Whale! Photography by: Natalia Oyarzun
Far from the region's major cities, the Hospedería requires clear and efficient productive and economic strategies to integrate with its surroundings without being overtaken by nature, vegetation, or wildlife.
These are the same principles the Jesuit priests employed to build their evangelization settlements, which give the province where the project is located its name.
First, selecting a high point is essential, ideally on a hill in the middle of the missionary jungle, to control and dominate the environment against threats and to communicate with other settlements using mirrors on sunny days or smoke and fire on cloudy days.
Additionally, it is crucial to confine a domestic area by creating an enclosed and protected outdoor space to keep jaguars, snakes, and suffocating vegetation at bay.
In the patio, a garden should be included to grow cassava, potatoes, and corn, reserving a small area for two or three goats and a handful of chickens to provide milk and eggs, alongside a cold-water pool to cool off during the stifling humid days that follow the incessant rains throughout the year. These rains nourish the spongy, reddish soil that sustains the jungle.
A spacious dining hall is also necessary, with a large exposed kitchen serving as a great room for evening banquets.
The southern orientation is ideal for resting the eyes from the sun and gazing at the dark green of the healthy and firm araucarias standing tall through the immense window. At each end of the refectory lies the guest area on one side and the host's quarters on the other.
A long and towering volume, as high as could be conceived, built entirely from the pinewood whose plantations carve into and erode the jungle and its diversity.
Completely painted in glossy black inside and out, it reveals at every step the oxidized soil and limestone rocks used to build the sand castles we now call Jesuit missions—premature ruins of a civilization with utopian ambitions. Though short-lived, it left a deep mark on the vast territory of subtropical South America, where Guaraní culture continues to be valued to this day. Text description by the architects.
