Lula House

2020

Single Family House. 

Location: La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Area: 120 m2

The House

This house is located in Gonnet, in the northeast of La Plata. In this suburban setting, a house for a contemporary family is designed, which requires new ways of understanding and approaching the project to incorporate the needs of this social group in the design.

That is why the design is based on an almost total indeterminacy of interior spaces, aiming at providing, within a limited surface area, a certain number of functional facilities that can be used in different ways by a different number of people. Thus, the spaces have different purposes at different times and maximum flexibility is needed to adapt them to a fluctuating number of occupants.  In order to maximize this concept, the design offers users the possibility of dividing the rooms using mobile dividers in order to adapt them for different uses. At the same time, this helps reduce costs during the initial construction stage and owners can move to the house earlier.

In this project, the concept of adaptability is interpreted through the myriad of uses once the house is occupied, given that its occupants can decide what best fits their needs after moving in.

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