Autarky, Phenomenology, and the Expanded Field in a High-Andean Off-Grid Dwelling: A Design-Inhabitation Case Study of El Mirador de la Luna

El Mirador de la Luna is an off-grid single-family dwelling at 2640 m above sea level (a.s.l.) in Higospamba Alto, Cuenca, Ecuador. The study examines which dimensions of inhabiting under conditions of real autarky exceed the reach of conventional methods of architectural analysis. This single longitudinal case study (n = 1), with twenty years of gestation, six of photography and drawing on site, and six of qualitative post-occupancy evaluation (2020–2026), is the primary instrument of a design-inhabitation methodology that dissolves the separation between theory and practice when the architect acts simultaneously as researcher, designer, and inhabitant. The methodology extends Wallas’s four phases (1926) with a fifth, gestation, which names the time of in-venting prior to the existence of a site, a brief, or a commission, anchored in the in-vention (in-venire) of García Cors (2024). The philosophical foundation integrates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Rosalind Krauss’s expanded field (1979), Epicurean autarky, and Levinasian intimacy as interpenetrability, all operating as instruments of verification. Three unanticipated findings, a stratified soundscape made audible by the elevated slab, anabatic winds that drive rain in under the eaves, and orographic fog as absolute interior, produced three documented responses, an executed opening, an attempt the site rejected, and an operating protocol. The courtyard, a decision prior to the work sustained at a structural cost, accumulates six years of recorded use. Balcony and courtyard hold distinct modes of attention, directed in the first and undirected in the second. Operational autarky was achieved in electricity, thermal comfort, hot water, and wastewater. Post-occupancy thus operates as design in two directions, in the sense of Schön’s reflective practice (1983). Material autarky is shown to be a geographical condition rather than an ideological choice, and Platonic Eros, inscribed in the sketches before the work, makes its generative role verifiable in the graphic record.