Casa Poli is only a 30-mile drive from Chile’s second-largest city, Concepción, midway down the country’s coast, but it feels perched at the edge of the world: a place with limitless ocean views, a soundtrack provided by wind and pelicans, and no other human beings within eyeshot, except for local fishermen in boats, hundreds of feet offshore. Venture 45 minutes outside any major city in the United States, and you’re in an exurban tangle of highways, but here, half the roads remain unpaved. In the States, a weekend house such a quick jaunt from the city would mean high prices for land and construction, yet here, Pezo von Ellrichshausen Architects (PvE) built almost 2,000 square feet for $63,000 dollars. But if the Coliumo Peninsula, on which Casa Poli rests, sounds too idyllic, the truth about its development should be told: On the bay side of this landform, construction cranes are busily erecting weekend retreats for city residents. Only the Pacific Ocean side has remained largely uninhabited, and mostly because many people consider its terrain less suitable for building. Of course, that could change now that word has gotten out about Casa Poli. (The house garnered first prize at the 2006 Santiago Biennale, where its architects, Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen, a married couple, won the Best Young Chilean Architects Award.)The pair found this piece of pristine cliff through Pezo’s friend and mentor, artist and writer Eduardo Meissner and his wife, sculptor Rosemarie Prim. Though the property’s value had appreciated in recent years, the seller wanted to divest herself of the 2.5-acre parcel for the same price she’d paid for it long before Chile’s economic boom, hoping her generosity would spur the buyers to build something more meaningful than the cookie-cutter, cast-concrete spec houses abounding elsewhere on the peninsula.The two couples bought the land together in 2003 and at first considered erecting two houses there, but over the course of several dinners realized that neither pair would be on-site enough to warrant double construction. As they discussed the program for a single house, they began to imagine the structure serving not merely themselves, but also a larger community. “Once we decided not to build two houses,” recalls von Ellrichshausen, “we knew we needed to do more and give something back to this area.” They agreed to turn the house into an artist’s residency during the off-season, when neither couple would be using it.For Pezo and von Ellrichshausen, whose small, five-year-old practice “started the minute we met,” jokes von Ellrichshausen, the challenge was to create a house that felt domestic and comfortable, but might also inspire the abstract thinking of artists. Budget, or lack thereof, was a valuable constraint in determining the material palette.Concrete–cheap, reliable, and low maintenance–served PvE’s needs, with the toughness to fend off formidable elements. At this site, the sun beats down almost 15 hours a day at the peak of summer, and a strong, southerly wind races continually over the cliff year-round. (A recent storm tore apart a neighboring prefab house.)After considering siting the house some 300 feet back from the precipice that drops 200 feet down to the ocean, the architects picked a more dramatic and less sheltered spot: on the parcel’s flattest area, near the land’s edge, with uninterrupted 360-degree views. Even if the surrounding tracts, where cows currently graze, are ever developed, they reasoned, this high vantage point would still claim unblocked views.Of course, the landscape was just one factor influencing the architectural decisions. In a region where shingled salt boxes and concrete shacks typify the previous generation of weekend homes, a glitzy, high-tech residence would have seemed glaringly out of touch with the vernacular architecture and social mores. Instead, a local building crew–wielding one small mixer, four wheelbarrows, and scant background in Modern architecture–completed the cubic, 1,937-square-foot, board-formed concrete house in 18 months.The formwork left the concrete with a rough-hewn surface that gives the otherwise spare construction a textural richness–a handsomely imperfect, striated motif. PvE found inspiration from various sources, including the starkness of Adolf Loos’s work and, Pezo recalls, from objects that “aren’t consciously designed.” From a distance, Casa Poli conveys a distinctively less-than-deliberate quality, evoking an ancient ruin. But the intent of the architects soon reveals itself in the way the structure sits atop its granite peak, as if its ideal, cubic form had evolved from the cliff’s jagged shards.The house, taking its name, Poli, from the Greek for “many,” features repeated shapes. Its 20 windows, all square and mullionfree, vary from paperback-book-size punctures, with flush glazing, to 7.3-foot-square openings, with the glass set back more than 3 feet from the face of the building, forming entryways on the ground floor and balconies on the second. Staggered at different levels, rather than arrayed in strict bands, the windows hint at the interior’s split-level floor planes, which give the main living space three tiers and provide the bedrooms, located upstairs, with sunken seating and observation areas.Not surprisingly, the owner-couples, who visit Casa Poli on alternating summer weekends, spend much of their time here simply looking out at the framed vistas, culled from the vast landscape. The patchwork of windows–with several heights visible at once from multistoried spaces or across the split levels–suggests an array of postcards with flat, abstract images of the sea and terrain. At the same time, the large apertures give the sense of a house virtually inhabited by the landscape.Effectively thickening the perimeter wall, while providing a buffer against the elements, a hollow layer of closets, bathrooms, and staircases lines the cube’s outer shell. Sliding partitions, made of the wood from the concrete formwork, are cleverly recycled as closet doors, painted white. The wood and the concrete carrying its imprints match seamlessly, adding ingeniously to the house’s dialogue between positive and negative forms or spaces. The wood panels also serve as interior shutters, allowing the owners to close up the cube for the week.From the bedroom windows facing into the main living space, which rises to double height, you get complex, oblique views through, into, and out of Casa Poli. The house’s box-within-a-box-within-a-box layout–a skylit, off-center light well within the living core, in turn surrounded by a service perimeter–is revealed by these sectional views. Yet the horizontal and vertical layering of spaces always keeps some corner hidden. Engaged by this seemingly infinite supply of tableaux, you get the feeling of never occupying any particular level or quadrant of the house. (Imagine inhabiting one of M.C. Escher’s impossible structures–another influence on PvE–and you approach this sensation of endlessness).Just as the multitiered kitchen, dining, and living areas blend together, fluidly morphing in function, the furniture, designed and fabricated by the architects, also performs multitasks. A couch that looks like a built-in fixture, for example, actually opens into four coffee tables. The owners have intentionally left the interior sparsely furnished and uncluttered; likewise, they never leave behind clothes or personal effects. This way, visitors–whether artists in residence or the owners themselves–experience the house as their own and no one else’s. (Already a handful of international painters and sculptors has taken turns using the place as a studio during the winter, and government funds have helped pay for exhibitions and other arts events in the space during the spring.)The absence of boundaries between most rooms leads to a pleasant lack of structure for time spent at Casa Poli. A day might begin with picking boldo leaves, a mintlike herb that grows all over the cliff, to make tea, followed by a leisurely hike down a footpath to the rocky shoreline where sea lions rest on boulders, or to a cave where the ocean’s tide rushes in, making the loudest noise all day. But this visitor was just as happy to sit on the grass staring at the house, then lounge inside gazing out, finding ultimate enjoyment in contemplating the sheer beauty of the building and its remarkable site.—Diana Lind