Article source: Carolina Pedroni + Delfina Riverti + Miguel Rossi
The house is situated on a high point of the terrain, surrounded by a number of large pine trees.
The abrupt shoulder towards the street is taken advantage of for the access to the house. A set of outdoor stairs connects to the high level of the garden, turning it into the new zero.
Carrasco International Airport, officially known as “Aeropuerto Internacional de Carrasco General Cesareo L. Berisso,” is located 11 miles (17.7 kilometers) east of downtown Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay. With one million passengers per year, it is the only airport in the country that provides year-round international connections. As a result, it carries great symbolic value as the “front door” for many visitors to the country. With this distinction in mind, Puerta del Sur, the airport owner and operator, commissioned Rafael Viñoly Architects to expand and modernize the existing facilities with a spacious new passenger terminal to expand capacity and spur commercial growth and tourism in the region.
Starting with the aforementioned demands and the conviction of designing an urban house, two ideas relative to the spatial organization prevailed above the rest.
The first consisted of appealing to the horizontal dimension: this was materialized through the configuration of the living spaces in an open plan set at street level. In this manner it established a link and an uninterrupted prolongation of the interiority and domestic uses onto the exterior spaces. Continuity only mediated and protected from the street noise by green spaces. This was achieved with the application of diverse mobile walls which with their hiding and different configurations enable the spatial performance.
It’s a single family home located on a corner lot that occupies the interior of a small pre-existing warehouse, which previously accommodated a weaving workshop. The warehouse in its severity and introversion is utilized as protection from a very proximate urbanity.
As a result of the need to build a new front of house (cafeteria, administration, restrooms, staff areas, etc.) and to change the circulation layout to provide for universal accessibility, the spatial perception of constricted public areas was doubled. The new building associates with the existing one in a complex manner. First, it acknowledges the primary role of the theater building, and takes from it its design guidelines: material and color, its own height and the height of its formal components, how its façade aligns, and the leading role of solid over hollow. However, this relationship is strained by opposites: the weight of the older building contrasts with a light construction that disregards massiveness while choosing planes that join together following the logic of an origami. While the former’s genetic memory features stone, the latter’s one features paper. The plot of land for the new building had been surrounded by a wall that replicated the material and the esthetics of the theater. What ensued shows a contemporary sensitivity that – as expressed by Solá-Morales – waves from resemblance to analogy.
Which are the limits of the traditional housing protocol? The project is a specialized mediation mechanism between the ideas and the built reality.
Adaptability is searched in a realistic path, without sacrificing necessary explorations, not as an emulation of flexibility, but as a neutral inhabit platform. Multiple appropriations, rather than an options menu. Assuming an array of predictions for an undefined user seems an infertile path. Consequently, the disposition of inhabitable spaces can establish specific uses, as well as integrate or fuse with the exterior built spaces, circulations and green areas. This vectors suggest expansion possibilities according to the interests of the diverse inhabitants. The composition logic allows, in all cases, to increase the buildable space, from the public areas to the private space and in correspondence with the free terrain.
The assignment was to reform and expand a property (housing) with protection value grade 3 (low) within the buildings listed as national heritage for its architectural value in the historical process of the city, changing its destination housing offices, thus resolving the installation of the new headquarters of the PUBLICIS IMPETU MONTEVIDEO URUGUAY.
Rescue the work of master Antonio Bonet for the community.
Recovering the spirit of the original project in terms of its implantation as well as of its original architecture was always the main concern for adopting intervention criteria. Throughout the years, more than 100m2 had been added to the original project, which have been demolished giving the project its original volumetry back.
Building a utilitarian building marked the direction of this project.
That is why the whole strategy turned around the prefiguration of a traditional typology. The different elements of the composition, galleries, sloping roofs, metal enclosures, are the typical components that qualify this type of buildings in this place.
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