Luisina House

2018

Single Family House. 

Location: La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Area: 94,60 m2

The House

This house designed for a young photographer is located in Parque Sicardi, an area within Arana, a district in La Plata, to the southeast of the city center, between the Provincial Airdrome and the neighboring district of Ignacio Correas. 

The design strategy meets the requirement of a minimal building area in a first stage, with four different possibilities of expansion that can be combined, in order to ensure the need to adapt to the changing contemporary lifestyles, offering the owner the possibility of conducting the changes herself and independently once she is living in the house. As this house project includes a future photography studio, the gradual expansion should include public spaces for workshops and exhibitions. The initial stage comprises a minimal domestic space, considering a later intervention on some areas of the house, both from the technical and spatial point of view. 

The houses are located outside built-up areas, on the outskirts. The strategy to occupy land is based on the availability of reduced areas using a compact modular system. We resort to a system of galleries and patios as transition spaces, with the aim of creating all kinds of possible intermediate spaces between what we consider, strictly speaking, inner and outer spaces. We use a language that is elementary and redundant at the same time, full of substitutes. The functional disposition focuses on amplifying spaces in a minimum area, providing them with multiple textures and potential uses.

The compositional logics of the structure propose a spatial dynamics where the services are clustered to give freedom to other spaces. The geometric sequence of the modulation works as a connector and articulator from the inside to the outside. The materials are bare exposing their texture and their peculiar colors.

The spaces that are expanded to the outside project sequences of appropriation of the surrounding landscape, stemming from some systems of flexible relations suggested by the free modules.

The building highlights local architectures, by means of processes that resignify traditional elements.

 The objective is to define structural and constructive systems that become opportunities, growth spaces and possible transformations. They are thought freely, openly to allow future concretions. Facilities must support changes and updates. The inhabitant is fundamental in the project process, since her future intervention – in the concretion of her habitat – is one of the fundamental issues to decide the construction systems, the house must adapt to her future needs, it must be able to be improved.

Housing designed under the condition of adaptability implies conceiving it no longer as a finished product, but as a support. A house that is in its initial phase offers minimum benefits, but has been designed to incorporate new terminations, better equipment and future contributions from our user. In this way, economic and material resources are also optimized.

Team: Luciana Fernandez Reimers, Elena Risso.

Photography: Fernando Schapochnik.

DOCUMENTATION