自建房丨阿根廷丨vbrügg

Architects:vbrügg

Year:2024

Photographs:Federico Cairoli

Lead Architect:Valentín Brügger

Country:Argentina

Text description provided by the architects. Casa Lelis is located in Los Reartes, a town in the Sierras of Córdoba, where traditional architecture is characterized by stone walls and light roofs made of sticks and metal sheets. In this context, the building respects local technology and synthesizes its materiality into concrete and white elements. On a 10 x 30 site, the 8 x 12 house is organized in longitudinal strips that define the ground floor areas, service, living room, and gallery over which the bedrooms on the upper floor are perpendicularly superimposed.

To the south, there is the service module, stereotomic, of artisanal technology built in cyclopean concrete and of a contained scale. It has stones on the façade that continue towards the interior in the warm areas, in front of the kitchen, in the center of the salamander, and in the back of the grill. This solid volume has two irregular and faceted perforations as if they were large extracted stones. One at the back, which opens a small terrace towards the garden. The other is a mirror that reflects a portion of the mountain landscape in the composition of the façade and allows you to observe the town's movement from the kitchen.

On the staircase, the concrete overflows towards the living room with its first steps, which emerge from the ground, and rise like a light structure of folded white sheet metal that floats between the concrete walls. To the north, there are the other two modules intended for social, tectonic, industrial technology, and material unity spaces through the white finish.

Built in a metal structure placed every four meters that support the roof of round sticks, covered with tongue and groove on the inside and corrugated sheet metal on the outside. This lightness allows the interior space to flow, integrating the living room with the gallery. The upper floor overlooks both the patio and the dining room.

Finally, the house is wrapped with a system of mobile enclosures that enable and qualify an intermediate space. The various opening configurations that regulate the entry of light define the interior atmosphere and the envelope is therefore changing, sensitive to the environment and use. Being a weekend house, it remains completely closed most of the time, evidencing its formal synthesis.

Details such as the entrance handle made up of four floating stones of White Micosa, a step of Field Stone suspended on the terrace, the intentional changes in scale, and a glass line throughout the development of the house that separates the white from the concrete base, the aim is to reinforce the evident duality between solidity and lightness of the work.

With the differentiated opening towards the mountain landscape that integrates it into the environment plus the juxtaposition of construction techniques, the dialogue between the essential, the enduring, and the ethereal is established.

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