- region:
155 sqm
year:
2021
Manufacturers: alumia, and Dutch, high concrete, Lavige, MasterJus, give birth, Sagittarius
-
Principal architect:
Ariel Gallera, Cesar Amarante, Francisco Villamil, Luizina Noya
Text description provided by the architects. Casa Pinguino is a vacation residence in the tourist town of Carrillo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, designed to accommodate a variety of relaxing activities while sparing the use of available resources.
The exchange with the clients focused on examining the activities imagined in the summer house rather than the preconceived architectural form. Discussions of habits, sensibilities, desires, and tastes replaced the usual elementary exchanges regarding the number of bedrooms, square meters, and aspects relating to the appearance of the building.
As the owners admire traditional Japanese architecture, some concepts were reworked for use in the home.
The terrain without major topographical accidents allowed a house with a strong connection to the lot through a semi-covered gallery. The house is oriented linearly in three parallel layers to the boundary axes, placing the services in the least favorable direction to protect and open the main and gallery environments towards the north.
Relaxed guidelines around the use of the home made it possible to think about and allocate spaces in a less rigid way, allowing for flexibility in space and time.
The flexibility of the space is related to the lack of delineation of environments and movable elements that allow to quickly change the arrangement between a large meeting space and a living room with an enclosed bedroom. The aluminum and wood joinery allows for quick adjustments to the space, linking the covered and semi-covered units. By expanding the usable area and doubling the kitchen area by connecting it to the grilling area, an easy summer transformation of space and its usability is created.
Flexibility in time is linked to the multiple expansion possibilities, supported by a regular and modular scheme that allows new bathrooms and bedrooms to appear in the future as the layers of use continue. Casa Pinguino is an informal and flexible temporary residence with the potential to grow into a traditional distribution house if demand requires. It is an actionable spatial proposition that emerges from the interpretation of a particular way of life, allowing adaptation to current and future requirements. Indeterminacy in ways of living requires diversity in the formal definition of “home.”
The main use of the cart space is the result of the convergence of the three basic compositional elements: service, gallery and roof. The roof becomes massive, connecting the main carriage to a flexible mezzanine that doubles as a children’s bedroom and ending with a balcony that allows visual participation in the semi-covered area opposite the braai area.
The materiality and techniques applied were determined by various factors, such as the materials and labor available to perform the work. The region has a long history of wooden roofs, so Casa Pinguino allows us to rethink the pitched roof in Pinamar. The aim was to synthesize it by avoiding unnecessary construction complexities, seeking to connect with the local built heritage, and incorporating a rational vision for the application of this technology. On the outside, the ubiquitous wood on the inside fades in search of low maintenance. Only glass, concrete and sheet metal are exposed to the elements.
After adopting the concrete technology to build the gallery and the sheet metal for the roof, the sheet metal formwork system was developed for the service cart formwork. In this way, the elements interact with each other through relationships of form, geometry, color and materiality.
Casa Pinguino has a simple look but strives to respond to complex and changing requirements. It is a formal endeavor that explores contemporary aesthetics while making certain references to the history of the place. It is a project that aims to exploit the material and human resources of the region. But above all, it is a house that proposes without imposing, that changes according to the needs of the user in times when the pace of social transformations outpace the life of buildings.
(Signs for translation)Architecture