ABSTRACT
Open air rooms are those parts of a house that embrace a site’s environmental factors (i.e., the prevailing breezes, views, etc.), and encourage its inhabitants to enjoy life outdoors, especially in a place as evocative and rich in natural resources as Puerto Rico. This chapter focuses on another suburban house, the Emilio Rodriguez House, in order to introduce and then examine the many different types of open air rooms that Klumb employed in his houses, and how those open air rooms were meant to take advantage of environmental factors and a building’s surrounding contexts. Klumb’s repertoire of open air rooms included patios, terraces, verandas, cross-ventilated spaces, and breezeways. These spaces pervaded his many works detailed in this book, to include his public works adaptations of the jibaro hut, his houses shaped by unusual topographical-contextual planning grids, his houses set in dense urban spaces, and his modern stilt houses.
