Architects:Giusto Van Campenhout

Area :115 m²

Year :2018

Photographs :Javier Agustín rojas

Construction & Technical Developpement : Marcos Asa

Team : Nelson Van Campenhout, Santiago Giusto, Dario Graschinski

City : Buenos Aires

Country : Argentina

If for a moment we decontextualize and take the famous Mies’ quote “less is more” literally, we could end up arguing that the primary preoccupation of architecture should be demolishing and not building. It is of course an argument that can’t be taken seriously as a universal dogma, but Ungers and Koolhaas have already explored in their seminal project Berlin as a Green Archipelago, how useful voiding could be in some specific scenarios. We thought that The Casa Chorizo project could be one of them.

When a client came to us asking to refurbish an old casa chorizo in ruins into his dwelling “without adding anything”, we proposed doing “less than nothing”. We thought that the house was actually too big for the use he was going to give it and that the most logical thing to do was to make the house’s interior space smaller. It was daring on his part to accept this in a society driven by the maximization of the built square meter. Still, he understood how valuable this act could be regarding other forms of non-human life and more efficient use of energy and materials. The project was structured in a series of incisions on the existing structure that reorganized the functioning and spatial qualities of the house.

By reducing the existing structural footprint, the casa chorizo project can be seen as an effort to make an architecture that minimizes the use of energy and materials in an attempt to build an environment that leaves space for other forms of life can emerge, in Buenos Aires a city that is among the least green cities in the world, with only about 1.8 square meters per capita of green space.

The house functions as a dwelling for a young couple, a dog, and a multitude of plants and insects that little by little populate the space. The interior space of the house is divided by a circular patio. A more public room is left in the front of the house disconnected from the more private areas. The house ends with a glassed bathroom where you can take a shower looking at the sky. The terrace is mostly covered by a green roof that was left to grow through an entropic process once planted. At an urban scale, the project can be seen as a small green oasis that humbly helps in building up the city’s biodiversity and biomass. At a human scale, the house can be understood as an attempt to build a green domestic landscape in the center of a dense metropolis.

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