Moreno, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Category:            Private Homes
Year:                2022
Architects:          MCL Studio 
Lead Architect:      Juan Micieli 
Design Team:         Ernesto Villanueva, Josefina Abate, G. Mosquera, Pedro Peirano, and Santiago Gallo 
General Contractor: MCL Studio 
Client:             Private
Photographers:      Gonzalo Viramonte       

Facing a vast golf course in a low-density neighborhood with lush vegetation, the house maintains a constant connection with a high-quality outdoor space. Through formal structural decisions, it manages to generate atmospheres that define the spaces, offering a wide variety of situations that evoke diverse emotions and challenge those who inhabit them.

The first decision is very simple: to free up the ground floor for common uses, allowing for a great fluidity between the interior and exterior. To achieve this, the design resorts to the traditional form of the portico. Thanks to the use of concrete and the free height, it creates a 30-meter span under which the entire house unfolds across two levels.

The structural blueprint of the home is practically the final layout, and each technical limitation is used as a resource to develop the dwelling. The two large supports of the portico are used as service spaces, placing programs inside them as if it were the poché of the École des Beaux-Arts; the coffered slab is used to organize all the interior spaces; and the height of the slabs and beams is used to accommodate different uses. Depending on what is needed, greater or lesser height is offered to the rooms, keeping service or circulation areas lower and allowing for two service terraces with uninterrupted views.

The heavy concrete structure makes it possible to create large spans and transparent spaces, giving the impression, from certain perspectives, that the house does not rest on the ground, while from other points, the structural system of the house is exposed and its tectonics are used as an aesthetic tool. It is conceived from technique to achieve sensory and symbolic results.

This dwelling demonstrates how a structure can be inhabited: all the spaces in the house are the result of structural decisions—beams become railings, supports divide spaces, the rhythm of the slab structures the interiors, and the texture of the concrete takes on an ornamental character. In this way, as the Paulista master used to say, the house is “the machine of its own construction.”