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Announcement RChD: Creación y Pensamiento |Vol. 10 Nº 18| JUN 2025 | Dossier: The multiscalar. Deadline for full manuscript submission: December 31, 2024. 

Bioclimatic Prostheses: an Emancipating Interface for the Free Adaptability of Transitional Spaces

Authors

  • Leonardo Agurto Venegas Instituto de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Facultad de Arquitectura y Artes, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3108-3892
  • Nicolás Fernández Gutiérrez Valdivia, Chile.
  • Fernando Palma Fanjul Facultad de Diseño, Universidad del Bio-Bío, Concepción, Chile.
  • Pedro Orellana Agüero Facultad de Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Geografía, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7396-0251

Abstract

People can influence and participate in the creation of technologies based on their own adaptability and self-construction behaviours in contexts of vulnerable housing. Currently, one of the main challenges of design is to reflect on its ability to be an agent in social transformation, in this case, from the generation of components and artefacts to adapt transitional spaces in domestic architecture. The weak thermal comfort and lack of adaptability that characterize social housing in Latin America makes urgent to seek solutions to rehabilitate and improve existing housing. The interventions on the transitional spaces, which are located in a hybrid environment, between the interior and the exterior, blurring limits between public and private spaces, creating complexity, have a double value. On one hand, they are decisive to reduce energy demands; and on the other hand, they allow the generation of their own intermediate spaces to foster social interaction. Recognizing these dual values, we propose to develop a system of adaptable technological solutions to be build and installed progressively by the people themselves, which are called Bioclimatic Prostheses, for houses and facades as a prosthesis to a body, with the aim of supplying special necessities, recognizing climate, environment and the community's own knowledge.

Keywords:

Adaptative architecture, bioclimatic design, modular system, self-construction, transitional spaces.