People reach for Greece when they try to describe Casapueblo, comparing its tumbling white forms to the cliffside houses of Santorini. Páez Vilaró never accepted the comparison. He pointed instead to the hornero, the rufous ovenbird, a small bird of Uruguay that molds a domed nest from mud and straw with no tools and no design beyond its own sense of shape. That was his model. He built the whole structure artisanally, without prior plans, letting it sprawl into a maze of rooms and stairways and unexpected openings. The result is not a building so much as a single enormous sculpture, white from every angle, that happens to contain a museum, an atelier, galleries, a hotel, and the home where the artist spent his last days.

Inside Casapueblo, a tribute honors the artist's son, Carlos Miguel, known as Carlitos. On 13 October 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed high in the Andes, carrying a rugby team and their companions. Of the forty-five people aboard, sixteen survived more than two months in the snow before their rescue that December, and Carlitos was one of them. His father refused to give them up for dead. Carlos Páez Vilaró personally threw himself into the search across the mountains, hunting for any sign of the missing while officials lost hope. When the survivors finally walked out of the cordillera, father and son were reunited. The building above the sea holds that joy and that terror together, a private memory built into a public landmark.

Carlos Páez Vilaró resisted any single label. He was a painter, a potter, a sculptor, a muralist, a writer, and a composer, and Casapueblo became the vessel for all of it. In its main dome, the museum and workshop display the range of his output, spread across rooms he named for figures he admired: a Pablo Picasso room, a Nicolás Guillén room, a Rafael Squirru room. The terraces carry whimsical names too, like the Tavern of the Green Ray and the Hippocampus Lookout. Over the years the cultural and political world came to him here, from the writer Isabel Allende to the Brazilian poet and musician Vinícius de Moraes. The place was less a residence than a living, growing self-portrait.

Each evening, as the sun lowers toward the Atlantic, the terraces of Casapueblo fall quiet for the Ceremony of the Sun, a ritual the artist began in 1994. Minutes before the light slips below the horizon, his recorded voice rises over the gathered visitors and recites a poem, a farewell to the departing day. Páez Vilaró died in 2014, but the ceremony continues exactly as he made it, his voice still bidding the sun goodnight from the very terraces he sculpted by hand. The thirteen floors he raised over 36 years still face west, still catch the last gold light, and the building does what it was always meant to do: it watches the sun go down over the water, evening after evening, without fail.