(CHILI) As the heir to a lengthy tradition involving the vernacular import and adaptation of modern architectural paradigms, the work of Mathias Klotz weaves its way between references to the 20th century avant-gardes and an assertion of the Chilean cultural and geographical context. For him, architecture has a duty to be clear. By favouring simple figures and rough, unfinished materials, Klotz strives to find answers which, in the most readable way possible, balance site restrictions and programme data. In this balance, Mathias Klotz bases the specific nature of each one of his projects. The very large number of houses he has built in Chile since the early 1990s together convey an architecture involving piles, cantilevers, and tensions between geometric abstraction and brutalist materials, between bareness of volumes and nature's luxuriance. The house he is showing at Archilab, currently on the drawing-board, is planned to be built on a wooded site with conifers in the Cuchaga region. It comes across like a monolith, smacking obviously of Mies van der Rohe, as if levitating on slender stilts.

Mathias Klotz
Klotz (Mathias) (1965)
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• A House in the Cuchaga Region Chile, en cours