Bovero House / German Müller

Curated by ArchDaily

Architects: German Müller
Year: 2014
Photographs:Federico Cairoli

Text description provided by the architects. Bovero House is located in the municipality of Arroyo Leyes in the province of Santa Fe, 10 km from the provincial capital in a residential area of high landscape value. This commune with the City of Rincon, Colastiné and others were formerly the site of summer homes of Santa Fe families, due to the lack of land in the city and improving transportation networks and services, in recent years this area has grown exponentially with families who establish permanent residence here. Thus, on Provincial Route No. 1 there are a lot of subdivisions and developments that expand the conglomerate known as Greater Santa Fe.

Due to the low level of land where the building lots are located and the reclaimed lands from the floodplain of the rivers, the sector's problems are flooding both by rising rivers as well as runoff rainwater. Thus it is required to place the houses at a safe altitude, so we had to raise the house one meter from the ground level to match the existing defense level.

The requirement was to solve a home of approximately 80m2 for a literature teacher, whose children had already left, so no immediate future extensions were required, with a tight budget, through the government mortgage program Procrear on a corner of 16x55m.

The house seeks to claim the linearity of the lot setting an urban facade on the access road and opening the facade into the eucalyptus forest that persists in front of it as undeveloped space. Therefore the program is solved linearly with the sequence living room-kitchen-bathroom-bedroom, introducing a courtyard in the center of the house that incorporates the landscape into the house and organizes the kitchen as a meeting place around a breakfast that is part of the yard.

The pre-existence of two large Eucaliptus trees and a lot of typical coastal landscape (Espinillos) set the tone for preserving the largest possible number of trees by inserting the house into the landscape. In turn, we took into account the shadows of the Eucalyptus in the decision to set the house east-west, which allowed us to open the house to the north with the best sunlight conditions.

The interior space is delimited by the wall enclosure which in its configuration addresses three issues: the structural support of the house, it is the programmatic element that organizes in its depth the support of the interior spaces that are free-standing, and the symbolic element that covers the literature collection that is part of the routine of the inhabitant.

The tight budget led to the decision to try to avoid subsequent finishes after construction was over, and that the construction itself was to be its own material expression. The materials are exposed defining the colors and textures of the construction as result and expression of the implicit technique in the process that does not seek to hide its essence.