This project was a great challenge for the Studio, considering that it was going to take part of the urban structure. The lot of 18 x24 metersis located in Devoto. It is between two existing buildings that threatens the project when the problem of isolation and view. For this reason this project is leaning towards its neighbor, creating an introspective posture that creates the views from the inside rather than from the outside. An architecture that generated its own views. In this manner the Project was able to solve the basis of isolation and views from the garden. This was a constant worry from the clients since the beginning of the Project.
A corner lot in the best area of April country club, located in what was once the area’s original ranch house, retaining old trees that gave, in addition to the environment, the feeling of being in the midst of a forest. The first decision was to locate the house at the end of the ground to allow maximum sunlight, thus preventing the building volume shadow to be projected on the garden. Logic indicated to open the main rooms to the garden, but the problem was what to do with the main access and service areas which remained connected to the back garden and where poorly lit.
“Our office encourages the client to take part in the design process in order to achieve fully personalized buildings and homes within a contemporary aesthetical frame”, remark the heads of GMARQ, architects Adrián Govetto and Lucas Mansilla. However, House A process was not born out of this work philosophy because during the first meetings with our clients, a couple with no children, they made it clear that they had no preconceived idea of how their future house should look like or how it would be. But during following meetings they told us how their daily lives were, their routines and what their expectations were for the future.
This 130 m² house is constructed in “Los Huemules” Ecological Reserve, 10 km from El Chalten town in the southern part of Santa Cruz province, Argentina. The Patagonian natural environment that surrounds the project was the most important input for designing this residence: the scale of the construction is aligned with the forest canopy providing a contained horizontal view from the interior to the sheltered heart of the forest.
The house is located in a neighborhood not yet fully developed on the outskirts of Rosario. The landscape has the rural character of the Pampas, with fields and orchards along with warehouses and criollo brick kilns (named for the vernacular technique of fabricating clay bricks by hand). The design strategy looks for a compact country house, located on the south side of the lot in order to capture sunlight and to open a large garden area. The shape is the result of a volume subjected to cuts and operations of subtraction.
Foster + Partners has completed its first project in Latin America with the opening of the Faena Aleph Residences in Buenos Aires, Argentina – part of the reinvention of the former docks of Puerto Madero as a dynamic new urban quarter. Drawing on local architectural traditions, its apartments feature vaulted living spaces and deep, sheltered terraces that exploit the wonderful local climate and maximise views towards the city and Rio de la Plata.
This was our first project in Costa Esmeralda, a real estate development neighbor to Pinamar started in 2004. As a recent batching, at the moment there are very few constructions and the place is known for having different types of landscapes, with vegetation varying from pine forests, with similar characteristics to the forest of Mar Azul, to areas where that vegetation is scarce.
The ground of 20m x 30m located in the forest of Mar Azul has the particularity of a very important unevenness respect of the two streets it faces. While this complicates the resolution of access to the site provides the advantage that, if the house is located high, it is very little exposed to the gaze from the street, and also from the inside you can get views of the landscape above the neighboring buildings. This difference in level is more or less smooth to the back of the lot, but it is very sharp towards the opposite front and in this area the forest is also thinned.
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.
It was about intervening in an area of outstanding natural beauty, owner of a wild strong presence that gradually has been domesticated by the proliferation of constructions with a formal search between a bucolic character and picturesqueness which in no way refer to that environment nor to this present.
We propose choices which guarantee the survival of the natural environment.
Mar Azul is a place well-known for us from time ago, so when we built our first work in 2004, we knew that we have to intervene a land that, despite of its worthy landscape, had never count with a legal support that protect this patrimony of those which built with a unique aim: get the most out of the earth. This land neither count with a code that, understanding the logic of this privileged space, regulate resolving the difference between this inappropriate constructions and the possibility of building without losing the properties of the site. In addition to this situation, the habit of building “picturesque houses in a place of fantasy” is taming slowly the forest, which is nowadays owner of a strong wild presence.
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