tresarquitectos Lifts a Prefabricated Gabled Cabin onto Concrete Columns in the Forests of Rionegro, Colombia

Most cabins that call themselves prototypes are really one-offs with a marketing ambition. Prototipoextend, by Puebla-based tresarquitectos, earns the word more honestly. The idea began as an academic exercise in 2004 and reached the ground, or very nearly the ground, fourteen years later in Rionegro, Antioquia, as a 54 m² shelter in a forested rural setting. The intent was never a single house. It was a model for producing more shelters of the same kind.

What makes it interesting is the arithmetic. The house sits on one, two or three concrete columns, and each added column extends the plan: roughly 27, 47 or 67 m². Above those supports, an industrialized, repetitive steel frame carries gabled modules that are fabricated off site, lifted and set in place. The result is a dwelling that touches only about 7% of its footprint. That figure matters more than any of the finishes, because it turns a familiar house silhouette into a system with a minimal footprint on the forest floor.

A Familiar Gable on Very Few Points of Contact

From the gravel forecourt, Prototipoextend reads as the house a child would draw: a pitched roof, a gable end with a window, a door. Timber cladding and a dark standing-seam metal roof keep the palette restrained, and the profile never strains for novelty. We think that restraint is deliberate. The architects describe the gable as an archetype, and using it lets the structural argument underneath carry the weight instead of the silhouette.

The real decision is out of view from most angles. Because the volume is carried on concrete columns rather than a continuous foundation, the ground plane stays mostly undisturbed. Fern planting runs right up to the building, and the gravel reads as a threshold, not a slab. For a structure meant to be repeated across wooded sites, keeping excavation to a few column footings is the sensible move.

The Deck Is Where the House Meets the Forest

If the columns minimize contact with the ground, the deck manages contact with the landscape. It extends out toward the trees and lawn, separated from the interior by a fully glazed wall, so the sitting nook inside and the chairs outside face the same view across the glass. At dusk the two spaces nearly merge, which is exactly the experience the brief describes: comfort and nature together, without much square footage.

The furniture is modest, with rocking chairs, a glass side table and two metal chairs, and that suits a building of this size. The sliding doors do most of the spatial work by letting the living area borrow the deck whenever the weather allows.

Plywood Interiors Under a Pitched Roof

Inside, plywood lines both walls and ceiling, so the pitched section is legible everywhere you stand. In the bedroom a pentagonal window sits in the gable above the bed, repeating the exterior profile at the scale of a single opening. Black steel shelving brings the industrial logic of the frame indoors without making the room feel like a workshop.

The corridor shows where the occupants put their personality. A white wall carries black line illustrations, copper pendants hang overhead, and a glazed door at the end opens onto the deck. It is a reminder that a prototype does not need to stay neutral; the frame stays fixed while the surfaces are left for whoever lives there.

Service Spaces Compressed to the Essentials

The kitchenette and bathroom show how tightly the module is planned. Grey cabinetry, a steel sink and a single pendant fit into a narrow galley under the plywood pitch, lit by a small angled window. The bathroom uses a floating vanity, a vessel basin and a glass shower, with a gable-shaped window above that brings in daylight and once more echoes the roof.

These rooms are where small cabins usually fall apart, as plumbing and storage spread into space meant for living. Here they appear grouped toward the ends of the plan, which leaves the central zone open. In a modular system, keeping the wet rooms fixed is also what lets the other modules vary.

Plans and Drawings

The three floor plans make the strongest case for the prototype. Each keeps the same elongated shell with service rooms grouped toward one end, but the occupancy changes: one layout centers a living area between the kitchen and bedroom, another adds two single beds around a central kitchen core, and a third places facing sofas around a table. The shell stays the same while the way people live in it changes, which is the point of a system like this.

The cross-section shows the living floor raised on a truss, lifted clear of the terrain, under the pitched roof. The chalkboard sheet and the axonometric studies reveal the process behind the result: steel I-beam columns, and a direct comparison between a cylinder, a flat-roofed box and the gable. The gable won, and seeing the alternatives makes that choice read as reasoned rather than nostalgic.

The elevation studies document a wider search. A white-on-black sketch tests chimney-like boxes and steps along the long facades, a misty rendering lines up three box-shaped cabins with rust-red roof bands, and a collage frames house-shaped and rectangular openings in moss-green panels on concrete piers above exposed roots. That last image says plainly what the built work implies: the house hovers and the forest floor stays intact.

Why This Project Matters

Interest in small, well-designed retreats in nature is now worldwide, and much of what gets built is one-off cabins that disturb the site as much as a full house would. Prototipoextend shows a better path: a repeatable steel frame, parts fabricated in parallel off site, and a foundation reduced to a handful of columns. The fact that the floor area grows by adding a column is a clear idea, and it gives owners a direct link between budget, program and structure.

We would like to know more about how the building handles climate, orientation and ventilation, which the available documentation does not address. Still, the core contribution holds up. A design that took fourteen years to move from the classroom to a Colombian forest ended up simple: a familiar gable, raised a little off the ground, built so it can be produced again.

Prototipoextend by tresarquitectos. Location: Rionegro, Antioquia, Colombia. Area: 54 m². Year: 2018. Photography: tripodeurbano.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.