From Existing to Inhabited | Renovation of MAPAA's E_RC building
- Arq. Alejandra Polanía
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
AUTHOR: Alejandra Polanía
Architect with a keen interest in architecture, landscaping, and ecological restoration.
PROJECT: E_RC Project
ARCHITECTS: MAPA.a (Cristián Larraín-Matías Madsen)
PHOTOGRAPHY: Nico Saieh
LOCATION: Providencia, Santiago, Chile.
YEAR: 2015.
SQUARE METERS: 600 m2.
The E_RC project, designed by the MAPAA office, consists of the remodeling of a 600 m² building located in the Providencia district of Santiago, Chile. The property had been abandoned for more than thirty years, turning it into a disused structure in the heart of the city.
The project posed an architectural and urban challenge: how to recover an obsolete volume and transform it into a contemporary residential building capable of integrating into a neighborhood steeped in history. The result was the conversion of the property into a building with seven apartments, organized on three levels, with a design that highlights both the materiality and the relationship with the urban environment.
Providencia is a neighborhood characterized by a mix of modern buildings and traditional houses, with a strong sense of community identity. In this context, MAPAA opted for a strategy that did not involve demolition, but rather the rehabilitation and interpretation of the building. In this way, the project fits into the urban context with a logic of urban sustainability and transforms a void into a new architectural landmark. Therefore, this article analyzes four central aspects of the project: reuse, the interior-exterior relationship, the cladding of the façade, and the configuration of habitability.
Rehabilitation and Reuse
The reuse operation in the E_RC project was not limited to preserving the existing structure, but also involved rethinking its openings and envelopes to adapt them to a new residential program. Working on a building that had stood empty for decades, the challenge was how to update it without completely erasing its history.
One of the most significant changes was the enlargement of the facade openings, a decision aimed at ensuring better living conditions through increased natural light and ventilation. However, this transformation raised a question:
How to insert new elements into a wall that had a defined character?
The MAPAA team's response was to design prefabricated components that frame the new windows and clearly differentiate them from the rest of the façade. These are contemporary, recognizable, and coexist with the existing materiality. This strategy turns reuse into a process of reinterpretation, where the new does not hide the old, but rather dialogues with it. In this way, the renovation manages to keep the memory of the building alive while adapting it to current housing requirements.
Interior-exterior relationship
The renovation of the building completely redefined the relationship between the interior and the urban space. The decision to expand the existing openings responded to the need to ensure better lighting and natural ventilation in the apartments. These new openings, framed with prefabricated pieces and arranged irregularly, break with the original symmetry and give the façade a dynamic and contemporary rhythm.
More than just openings in the wall, the windows were conceived as habitable thresholds. Their depth generates shade and thermal comfort, functioning as intermediate spaces that mediate between the dwelling and the street. At the same time, each one offers a particular visual frame: some allow direct views of the neighborhood, while others filter light in a controlled manner, creating situations of greater intimacy.
From the outside, this layout gives the building an active and recognizable image, suggesting the life inside without exposing it completely. From the inside, the openings fragment the relationship with the surroundings, allowing for diverse and gradual visual connections with the street. The result is a balance between openness and privacy, where the building integrates with its urban context without sacrificing the comfort and intimacy of domestic life.
Facade cladding
In the search for a renewed identity, the brick façade became the central canvas of the proposal. MAPPA chose to work with a cladding system manufactured on site using common bricks, which were cut into trapezoidal pieces and then arranged in an inverted pattern. This creates an effect in how it behaves in relation to light, as the trapezoidal arrangement of the pieces generates small changes in plane that produce variations in shadow and relief throughout the day, giving the building greater visual depth and a dynamic character without resorting to added ornamentation. This artisanal procedure not only resolves the envelope, but also establishes a bridge with the neighborhood's construction tradition, reinterpreting in a contemporary key the reliefs and stucco details characteristic of classic Providencia buildings.
In this way, brick is not a nostalgic material here, but rather a tool for dialoguing with urban memory. The wall becomes dynamic and expressive, giving the building a recognizable presence in the fabric of Providencia and reaffirming the capacity of local materials to reinvent themselves.
Habitability configuration
The building houses seven apartments distributed over three levels, each designed with attention to light, ventilation, and spatial flexibility. The project avoids homogeneity: no two units are exactly alike, as the arrangement of the openings and the interaction with the façade give each dwelling a unique configuration.
The social areas are linked to the largest openings, creating bright spaces connected to the outside. In contrast, the private areas are located in more sheltered areas, where privacy prevails. This layout responds to a functional balance that combines community life and privacy within each unit.
The proposal demonstrates that it is possible to densify the city without resorting to standardized repetition, offering contemporary housing in a building that, despite its contained scale, manages to generate diversity and quality of life.
MAPAA's E_RC project demonstrates how reuse architecture can become a powerful strategy for revitalizing the city. A building abandoned for decades is transformed into a contemporary housing complex, bringing density and life to a traditional neighborhood in Providencia.
The project articulates three key operations: the sincerity of reuse, visible in the new windows and prefabricated pieces; material innovation, achieved with handcrafted brickwork to generate texture and shade; and the balanced relationship between interior and exterior, which gives each apartment its own identity.
Overall, the work is a benchmark for architectural intervention in established contexts, showing that urban memory is preserved not only through literal conservation, but also through the capacity for contemporary reinterpretation.
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