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Architects: Estudio Damero
- Area: 200 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Javier Agustín Rojas
Text description provided by the architects. When designing the renovation of Casa Planes, the challenge was not only the preservation of the built heritage, but also the preservation of the emotional heritage of its owners. Preserving the architectural identity of this typical chorizo house in Buenos Aires led us to enhance the old commercial facade, now projected as access to the new home. Considering the entrance area allowed us to develop the idea of an "urban oasis": a sequence of patios with differentiated uses that serve as a backdrop for interior living, while suggesting a continuity from the interior to the exterior.
Urban oasis: Access patio: Upon passing through the entrance door, one accesses the patio, previously used as a commercial store. The spatial layout activates anecdotes and past stories, stories of neighbors and family experiences. This patio serves as a buffer that separates the privacy of the house from the outside world, subtly revealing glimpses of the activity inside of the house and serving as a backdrop and expansion for a home office overlooking the street.
Intermediate patio: This space acts as an air space, allowing the sun's rays to enter the center of the house and offers a kitchen immersed in vegetation. Its conformation constitutes a slender void; in this space, the maximum height of the house is recognized. Its layout articulates the public part of the house and the circulations of the three levels, and generates a direct route from the access hall to the back patio.
Back patio: Composed of a semi-covered area and a large open-air space. The semi-covered, facing the north, not only acts as an expansion of the interior living room but also as a cool outdoor space that mitigates the direct summer solar incidence on the interior. The open sector, featuring a swimming pool, framed by native plants, enhances the idea of an "urban oasis".
The ground floor maintains and recognizes the spatial volumes of the premises of the old chorizo house, with its 4 meters wide and 3.60 meters high, its load bearing walls and the exposed vaulted ceiling. For growth on the upper levels, previously an inaccessible rooftop, spaces were designed to create pathways and crossed views that allows the "urban oasis" to be recognized from different points of view. To accommodate this expansion, a Steel Framing construction was chosen, to reduce the loads on the ground.
The house develops as a large uninterrupted mass of air from the ground floor to the upper floors. The new mezzanines play with their limits, breaking the inner edges to link with each other and with the exterior ones. The "jet"-shaped roof, reminiscent of the factory body, resolves the upper enclosure and gives a particular spatial characteristic to the playroom, an anteroom to the secondary bedrooms. The master bedroom hangs suspended in the garden and plunges into the calm of the “urban oasis”.
