Costa Esmeralda is a real estate development over the dunes on the coast, 390 km from Buenos Aires. This is a recent urban development with young acacias and pines forestation and some sectors of consolidated forest.
The lot to intervene is a high rise dune with the peculiarity of having in part aged woods and also a recent pine plantation, although undoubtedly its most prominent feature is the abruptness of its relief. Between the access road and the highest sector of the lot, located approx. in the plot center, there is a height difference of 12 m, so that in order to access to it is necessary to ascend a slope of more than 45 °.
The Project was based on a house built in the year 1918, located in La Paternal, a neighbourhood that still preserves the original grid of the city caracterized by small residential buildings, that managed to stay unaffected by the great movement of the city.
The owners, a very young couple, were searching for a new private room that would be built on an existing roof terrace, leaving the ground floor for the common areas, a recoding studio, a small showroom and a working space for a psychiatrist.
The place
Mar Azul is a seaside resort on the coast of Buenos Aires, located 12 miles south of Villa Gesell, with an extensive beach of dunes and lush virgin pine trees forest. The owners, members of the studio and for years familiar with this location, chose precisely the splendid scenery of the forest to build a small summer house.
An almost-level corner lot, within a pine forest in the north of Pinamar. A vacation home to be rented to different users. Thus, a program of flexible needs. The house was projected around three conditions: to be lifted from the natural level terrain in order not to modify its original contours, to occupy the biggest amount of frontage length at Fragata la Victoria Street in order to increase the apparent size of the house, as well as closing off the views from the street into the heart of the site (preventing the private areas from being exposed to the street) and to reduce the costs of future maintenance.
The lot is situated in Costa Esmeralda, a new private venture in Costa County. A small pine grove at the front of the site, and a steep slope down from the street to the back of the lot. A simple but paramount commission: to focus the program on the smallest portion of the lot as possible, since most of the natural landscape of the lot wants to be preserved. A vacation home thought for a family that wants to use the house for a variety of purposes, such as getting together and enjoying open air activities. The program is centered around two boxes stacked, skewed, balancing each other on top of a half buried stone plinth. As a result, the program takes less than twelve percent of the lot, leaving enough space for a swimming pool and a green dune –part of the landscape.
The project is located in the southern part of the city of Buenos Aires, precisely in Parque Patricios, a neighborhood that is being promoted as a technological pole. This characteristic motivated the client to start the construction of a building that unfolds into two separate volumes, his home and an office for his business. Both buildings have in common constructive and material decisions, however they show a strong formal contrast. In addition, the two volumes meet sustainable conditions: ventilated facades, reuse of rainwater and FCS certified wood ( OSB ).
Immediately establishing itself as a Buenos Aires architectural icon, Madero Walk Eventos is a 96,875 sq. ft. multi-purpose event destination berthed at #1 Puerto Madero Dock on B.A.’s trendy waterfront. Designed to host private parties, weddings and a variety of corporate and social events, the luxurious setting features over 16,460 sq. ft. of ‘party’ space, including two outdoor terraces with breathtaking harbor and city skyline views
This work is the result of a process that began in 2004 with the construction of a summer house in the forest of Mar Azul in order to take advantage of this intervention opportunity in a site of significant landscape values to propose design alternatives that take under consideration the protection of the natural environment as an unavoidable premise.
Exhibited at the XIII Biennale of Architecture in Venice, August 2012
MEMORY
The Place
We had to build an apartment building in a land of 8.66m of width in Boedo, a zone of Buenos Aires that, without loosing the typical characteristics of neighborhood, has been changing its physiognomy because of the urban densification. The particularly of the land in where we have to intervene is that its back yard is adjacent with an urban square, with an important vegetation where is placed a football school and a small square. The views to this green lung match with the best orientation: the North.
BUENOS AIRES:Non Stop TV is a thirty-year-old, full-service TV production complex, which totally lives up to its name. Founded in 1983, Non Stop produces content and provides audio, video and sophisticated post-production services for top rank clients in Latin America, Europe and Asia. With a staff of over 450, the studio turns out over 800 hours of programming each year for Disney Channel, Sony, Fox Sports, History Channel and many other leading broadcast/cinema content producers.
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