Virginia House

2017

Single Family House. PREMIO CAPBA OBRA CONSTRUÍDA – 2019.

Location: La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Area: 90,50 m2

The House

This is a small house for a single user that requires a minimal surface area to hold a multipurpose social space and a bedroom. 

It is located in Villa Elisa, a district in La Plata that is far from the city center. This is one of the suburban areas that has developed the most in the past few years and whose fabric is composed of country houses, isolated dwellings, and small housing estates.

The building area is limited in a first stage, but different possibilities of expansion that can be combined are considered in order to ensure the development of new spaces in the future and their appropriate distribution taking into account the large lot size.

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