Regenerative Biogenic Facades for Extreme Climates

Deserta Ecofolie: A Prototype for Minimum Dwelling in the Atacama Desert and Beyond. By Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Pamela Prado.
Deserta Ecofolie is a 16m2 prefabricated structure conceived to sustain a minimum dwelling in Chile’s Atacama Desert. It is the result of a longstanding collaboration with the Atacama UC Fog Oasis Research Station in Alto Patache, featuring “eco-technical objects” working within an “eco-technical ensemble” of fog catchers, photovoltaic cells, the provision of food through cultivating vegetables, as well as CINARK’s regenerative biogenic façade panels and other low consuming and sustainable appliances towards a carbon negative project disconnected from conventional supply networks.

Neither a house, nor a home, Deserta Ecofolie is an experimental prototype aimed at testing its own performance. As tool for measurement, it is meant to be the “smallest possible object” for two people to survive in the “worst-case scenario” of the Atacama. Its name derives from Rayner Banham’s 1982 book Scenes in America Deserta, referring to the renowned image of the historian riding a folding aluminium Bickerton bike at the Silurian Lake in California. This photograph taken by Tim Street-Porter portrays the bicycle as the smallest possible “eco-technical object”, which was rendered a symbol for a new myth on the origins of architecture, no longer the stiff typology of a primitive hut, but based in ecology, speed and technology.

Deserta Ecofolie is the result of collective intelligence and international interdisciplinary collaboration of architects, curators, geographers, engineers, biologists and agronomists from the Atacama Desert Centre at the Universidad Católica de Chile, the Centre for Industrialized Architecture – CINARK at the Royal Danish Academy School of Architecture, SUMMARY architects, and ArtWorks - Art Production & Manufacturing - in Porto.