Who says that a good architecture can't be low cost? The project designed by María Victoria Besonías, Guillermo de Almeida and Luciano Kruk is an a good example that it is possible. The building and maintenance costs of Mar Azul's house and its environment impact have been kept to a minimum degree. In this architectural work characterized by the presence of pine trees in the intervention area,the volume and the chosen materials, raw concrete and pine wood, provide an example of a material and formal simplicity that with its sober concept of elegance and integration harmonises with the context. You can find a fusion between the colors of the wood and the house self, a contamination between the outside and the inside that touch each other through the large windows and the different openings in the raw concrete, allowing a good illumination even in the most inner parts of the prisma. The whole in less the 70 square meters, with a good proportion between the night and the flexible day zone. Even the forniture, made out recycled Canadian pine wood, is in harmony with the environment.
Roberta Patrizia Di Benigno - Channelbeta
Location
Mar Azul is touristic resort on the shore of Buones Aires, it lays 12 km south of Villa Gesell. This city can boast a wide beach with natural dunes and a thick coniferous wood.
The owners, which played an active role in the project and know this location very good, choose the landscape of this wonderful wood as location for their summer house.
Proposal
The environmental and landscape characteristics of the location, the peculiarity of the project's goal and the absence of any conditionings on the client's side, enabled the designers to use this project as a chance to experiment both with functional themes and constructive-aesthetic solutions.
The intervention had only three limitations: low environmental impact, low building costs e almost nor existing maintenance costs. Under these premises, the house, in the middle of a site with 43 pine trees and on a ground with a light slope toward the road, has been developed as neutral pure prisma with a minimal height and defined by a winding surface of raw concrete, by the texture and the color harmonizing with the wood and wide glass surfaces that allow a perfect integration with the landscape and at the same time reflect it.
The complementary facilities (Second bathroom, storeroom and water tank) are put together in vertical wooden prisma hidden among the trees.
The functional organisation
The simple volume containing the main functions is developed in two distinct zones. The first one ist open to the outer world, completely glassed, and enclosed in a wide wooden terrace, conceived to host the group activities and perfectly integrated with wood like a belvedere. The second one is protected, the openings are more controlled, thought for the bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen. The house has not a real entrance, the people can go inside from the glassed zone through sliding doors set on two facades. This peculiar entrance and the room indetermination of first zone allow several ways of use. Indeed, if required, the two sliding doors can isolate in safe way this flexible part from the other rooms.
The structure
The house plan, 6.50m x 10.30m, covered with an reinforced concrete slab with a raw concrete facade, is sustained, without any intermediate supports, by raw concrete partitions and iron lines on the perimeter. These metal columns, designed with a minimal section, are lined up and integrated with the anodized aluminium openings becoming almost invisible.
The tower containing the complementary functions has a treated pine wood structure and is closed with saline Eucalyptus boards.
Realisation
The microclimate of the sea wood (a lot of shadow and weak wind) and the main usage of the house in the hot and temperate periods, enabled the architects to choose a building solution with low costs and a short building time: a winding surface out of raw concrete without complementary materials for the thermic isolation .
The roof is designed without either complex slopes with compluvia etc or impermeable membranes, the slab has been simply developed with just a single slope in order to let the water flow in three directions. Besides, the aesthetic quality of the raw concrete, its resistance and impermeability made superfluous any other surface treatment, achieving low building costs and avoiding the necessity of future maintenance, since the inner and outer raw concrete surfaces have been smoothed by hand to eliminate the typical adherences caused during the realisation. Consider also, that the color and texture of the reinforced concrete realised with wood boards formworks create an effect that could be defined as discrete and striking at same time. The building express itself in perfect harmony with the wood.
The inner partitions are made out of perforated bricks that have been painted with white latex painting, the floor is out of industrial concrete, the baseboard is designed with a profile of concave aluminium.
The industrial concrete floor is sub-divided by a pattern of aluminium plates with a module of 3,10m x 3.10m (generating pattern). In the glassed area, with the anodized aluminium openings, you can find an aluminium canal that drains the condensate water generated during the winter when the house is warmed, since the windows are without air chambers.
The light
Since the designers knew the atmosphere generated by the wood, their main goal was to obtain that the generous natural light could reach every single room, in order to achieve that, the wide glass surfaces weren't enough, they considered a light opening in the middle of the plan. So they conceived a cut with an L form in the middle of the house, in correspondence with the bathroom.
These deep slots, underlined by the raw concrete slab descending like a L beam, produce both in the bathroom and the daylight zone light effects that change during the day.
The artificial light is then used to underline the space indetermination of the main area of the house, using light artefacts that can modulate the intensity and direction of the light.
Light control and outside view were conceived with curtains in the bedrooms area and voile in the glassed area.
Forniture
The forniture were designed for this house, they are out of recycled Canadian pine wood originally used for engine packagings.
BAK
Arquitectos
María Victoria Besonías,
Guillermo de Almeida, Luciano Kruk
Buen
Viaje 1011 - 1ro.B
Moròn - (1708)
Buenos Aires (Ar)
translated by
Pietro De Berardinis
PROJECT
DETAILS
LOCATION :Mar Azul, provincia di Buenos Aires
ARCHITECTS : María V. Besonías, Guillermo de Almeida, Luciano Kruk
PARTENER : Diego Grosso
AREA : 470 m²
CONSTRUCTION AREA: 75 m²
YEAR ON CONSTRUCTION: 2004
CONSTRUCTION TIME: 6 months
PHOTO : Gustavo Sosa Pinilla
LINKS:
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Channelbeta
Information Channel on Contemporary
Architecture |
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[2008-04-30] |
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foto di Gustavo Sosa Pinilla
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