GRAPHĒ: Two Prefab Prisms Form an A-Frame Retreat in the Chilean Wilderness

With an off-the-grid house on a remote mountain, architect Smijan Radić rebuilds the past.

The deck was built on-site from local timber and incorporates an existing tree.

Getting to architect Smiljan Radić’s Casa Prisma is no easy feat. A flight from Santiago to the southern Chilean city of Temuco is followed by an hour-and-a-half car ride through small towns of rustic wooden buildings.

The road then narrows to a single track that winds through the charred brown lava fields of the Conguillío National Park, known for its fishable lagoons, swimmable lakes, lush old-growth forests, and the active, snow-capped Llaima volcano. A mile-long path zigzags up a steep slope to the final destination—the spot where Carolina Correa Maturana (who is related to Radić by marriage) and her husband, Antonio "Toño" Mingo, picked to build a vacation home.

Carolina Correa Maturana and Antonio Mingo chose a site in the mountains of Chile’s Conguillío National Park for their vacation home.

Photo by Cristóbal Palma

Toño, an architect, and Carolina, a psychologist, live in Santiago, and each has four grown children from a previous marriage. Their aim for the house was to create a convivial and unifying space for weekends and summer holidays. Carolina had vacationed in the area as a child—her sister settled there 20 years ago and now runs La Baita, an eco-lodge at the foot of the hill.

The couple enlisted architect Smiljan Radic, who designed two structures facing each other across a wooden deck. Each pays homage to an earlier building. One re-creates Kazuo Shinohara’s 1974 Prism House. The other (shown here) reprises one of Radic ́’s own designs.

Photo by Cristóbal Palma

They wanted the home to be a natural haven, with minimal disruption to the native landscape. After a thorough search, they discovered a clearing of roughly an acre and a half that required felling only three young trees in order to accommodate a house.