Dagmar ล tฤpรกnovรก of Formafatal recently completed the first rammed earth structures in Costa Rica that can be yours to rent for your next vacation. Achiotรฉ is a pair of minimalist villas in Playa Hermosa that look as if theyโre levitating above an overgrown cliff by the Pacific Ocean. The homes are situated in a jungle-like environment with lush greenery all around for ultimate privacy. Throughout the design and building process, Formafatal paid careful attention to sustainability and protecting the wild locale.
Each villaโs design is based on the energies felt in their locations by ล tฤpรกnovรก before construction even began. The vibrations led to two opposing designs โ the Jaspis Villa (jaspis = jasper, bright villa) reflecting a yin energy connected to the sky and ocean with shades of sand being the standout color, while the Nefrit Villa (nefrit = jade, dark villa) reflects the yang energy with connection to the ground and the surrounding jungle and featuring a red-terracotta color.
Cantilevered roofs extend out like the floors to provide protection from the sun and weather conditions.
All of the outer walls are built using the clay soil they excavated during the construction process, thereby reducing materials that needed to be imported in for the build. New tropical plants were added once the villas were complete.
The layers of the rammed earth walls stand out, adding texture while telling the homeโs story one layer at a time.
The 90-square-meter (approx. 969 square feet) villas are identical in size, layout, and orientation, while each structure utilizes its own choice of materials and color scheme.
The center of each design is the bed, which can be sectioned off with sliding curtains for privacy and mosquito protection. The endless views can be enjoyed from the bed through the frameless glass walls. Thereโs another bed on the terrace if one wanted to relax in nature.
Just off to the side of the villas are built-in pools which will make you feel like youโre swimming right in the jungle.
To make the rammed earth walls happen, Formafatal enlisted Brazilian specialist, Daniel Mantovani of Terra Compacta, to help train local craftsmen to complete the work.
Behind the beds, the kitchens and bathrooms live with no doors separating the spaces.
The bathroom sinks, shelves, kitchen counters, and beside tables are all custom made from concrete.
The Nefrit Villa features a much darker and moodier color palette, despite the villas being identical.
To book the villas, visit achioteproject.com.
Photos by BoysPlayNice.
โBurnoutโ is an inescapable concept these days. Its current usage, however, is a far cry from its origins in one psychologistโs appropriation of the imagery of urban arson in the 1970s, much of it instigated by landlords looking for insurance payouts. Bench Ansfield, a historian, makes the case for recognizing and reclaiming burnoutโs roots as a necessary social project:
Unlike broken windows, burnout has shed its roots in the social scientific vision of urban crisis: We donโt tend to associate the term with the city and its tumultuous history. But itโs actually quite telling that Freudenberger saw himself and his burned-out coworkers as akin to burned-out buildings. Though he didnโt acknowledge it in his own exploration of the term, those torched buildings had generated value by being destroyed. In transposing the cityโs creative destruction onto the bodies and minds of the urban care workers who were attending to its plight, Freudenbergerโs burnout likewise telegraphed how depletion, even to the point of destruction, could be profitable. After all, Freudenberger and his coworkers at the free clinic were struggling to patch the many holes of a healthcare system that valued profit above access.
Many left critics of the burnout paradigm have faulted the concept for individualizing and naturalizing the large-scale social antagonisms of neoliberal times. โAnytime you wanna use the word burnout replace it with trauma and exploitation,โ reads one representative tweet from the Nap Ministry, a project that advocates rest as a form of resistance. Theyโre not wrong. In Freudenbergerโs chapter on preventing burnout, for instance, he exhorts us to โacknowledge that the worldย isย the way it isโ and warns, โWe canโt despair over it, dwell on the pity of it, or agitate about it.โ Thatโs psychobabble for Margaret Thatcherโs infamous slogan, โThere is no alternative.โ But if we excavate burnoutโs infrastructural unconsciousโits origins in the material conditions of conflagrationโwe might discover a term with an unlikely potential for subversive meaning. An artifact of an incendiary history, burnout can vividly name the disposability of targeted populations under racial capitalismโa dynamic that, over time, has ensnared ever-wider swaths of the workforce.