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Architects: Estudio Nómade
- Area: 154 m²
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Manufacturers: Hormigon pasalto, Madera Dura
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Lead Architect: Fernando Iguerategui
Text description provided by the architects. There will be stories guarded in this piece, ports and remote places impossible to enumerate. We can only affirm that it provided the basic raw material for discussing concepts, and ideas and proposing project operations that required simultaneous actions between technology and space.
We feed on the images that the piece itself provided, in rural, urban, and suburban environments, elevated on cranes, and stackers, transported by ships or semi-trailers, as well as a myriad of situations and relationships that turned into arguments, sketches, and volumes.
While we consider the project naturally uncertain, we proposed to accentuate that idea of jumping into the void by understanding that new degrees of freedom is born in the face of restrictions. It certainly constituted a new experience. Working with a predetermined space, with an accentuated three-dimensional imprint, which comes to life from the obsolescence with respect to its original function.
Analyzing and decoding the container led us to study the limits and restrictions of a mono-material piece of 2.40 m x 2.40 m x 12.00 m, a universal dimensional response, with a weight of 4000 kg and a load-bearing capacity of 28000 kg, thus emerged meetings, contributions, exchanges in the study with Ing. Jorge Maiztegui and at the moment when everything seemed ordered, Geometry, Center of Gravity, Solicitations, asymmetry arose and again to the tracing, to the test, to verify the structure again.
The uncertainty does not end there, who builds the pieces that Jhon and Tomy designed? Who guarantees us the welding and anchoring cord? Although the container was mounted on a structure, we knew that part of it had the provisional condition (support and leveling) and the other definitive part.
The millimetric adjustment is a real challenge and possibly beyond our control, so we approached the workshops, some motivated the experience, and others not so much... Pablo, an industrial designer, narrowed the gap of uncertainty, manufacturing, machining, and testing the pieces, but this is one of the different stages of the construction process, we needed to find someone who guaranteed the on-site support, the real one, and finding Paska (Pavlo Yacoblev), a welder with a stamp from the Astillero Rio Santiago, was a real find, we still do not understand how he could mount and calibrate each of those tensioners, adjust them, put them under load, only with our eventual collaborations that could not exceed reaching a tool, holding a piece, or a mate, he won all our admiration, respect and gratitude for his teachings.
It was quite an event to remove the support, cut, and see what happened beyond the calculation and verifications, our expectations, and that of the neighborhood that knew and accepted it, even today it is a small urban reference, indicative of directions and streets without numbers.
Thus, the project merges sensations, technology, and habitability, the foundations are transformed into a counterweight and habitable enclosure that houses us in the long nights of competitions and weekend recreation, the possibility of a unique environment not only responds to dimensional conditions but also to the idea of an Architecture Workshop, in a natural environment, where we develop part of what we are passionate about, where time passes and you do not realize it. Suspending it allowed us to verify all its elements, find urban foundation by freeing the corner, and allowing Martin the neighbor to hold from his window the long perspective towards the grove of poplars. Accessing through the floor does not change the rules of the game, it awakens others and recovers a hidden face that becomes a facade, the idea of levitating is associated with inhabiting and discovering that a single element provides us, covered, semi-covered and open.
The economy in simple efforts and expectation for minimum resources. We understand it as an open experience, surely inconclusive, and imperfect, with the healthy ambition of a message valuing all those who left a good part of work and effort to conclude it, including the opinions of Jujo and Nacho's after-dinner conversations, always critics, and the possible ones that 3 generations involved in articulating the diversity of knowledge. Jumping into the void. Safe zones/uncertainty.
