Canning House / Estudio Borrachia

Curated by ArchDaily

Architects: Estudio Borrachia
Area: 161 m²
Year: 2017
Manufacturers: Blindex, Melón Hormigones

Text description provided by the architects. It's Tuesday afternoon, it was a tiring day and the feeling of coming home is always second to none. Martin, up to his home after driving and working all day; crosses the access yard between bicycles and skates and when he opens the door he will find an interior landscape where nature and the exterior surroundings merge, the green palette so typical of the Argentine countryside grows both inside and outside the house.

In the central courtyard, the fire is lit and floods all the spaces. His children play around and run through the gallery and the living room. His wife, Ana, just arrived from a long day, relaxes in the jacuzzi, he hears them laughing and watches the treetops move with the wind. It dusk, and the last rays of the sun enter by the gallery dying everything of orange.

The paragraphs that precedes this text describe an ideal moment to reach, thinking about this hypothetical inhabitant was the search engine that led the study to develop this work. Thus, without a specific client we work with a typical, middle-class user with one or two children, studying their way of living in these controlled landscapes, and we resort to certain elements of the autochthonous collective memory, such as the patio or the gallery, as a confirmation of this ideal; in synthesis we think of this house as a replicable typological system or model of inhabit the city outskirts.

To achieve this and also thinking about the assembly speed of the construction we adopt a hybrid technology, which can become a repetition system, where the whole structure is metallic, as is the roof. The brick was used as an expressive material and skin is introduced into a previously constructed iron frame, to become part of an element that we can describe as light in this conjunction.

The last component defines the atmosphere of the house both inside and outside. The wood, used in both horizontal planes, floor and ceiling, as framing the relationship of dwelling with the horizon, defining it and giving it a scale.

Canning House achieves through these few elements a maximum relation between nature and architecture, promoting a "Low Life"way to inhabit, where its user can enjoy open and flexible spaces, in direct contact with the outside; in addition to using mechanisms that manage climate control and the perceive the exterior, making this relationship comfortable without resorting to large energy costs. Double glazed hermetic windows, cross ventilation and insulation, air chambers, separation of the floor with the house on legs and heating by solar energy, are studied to achieve maximum efficiency in that sense.

The central patio organizes the spaces, not only tries to support these concepts functioning as a climatic catalyst, also allows to extend the interior life to the outside by the repair that offers, as much of the climate as of the sight of the neighbors.

It is a house conceived for the intimacy of the family life but at the same time ideal for social gatherings where all the spaces can be enjoyed and used at the same time. That was the message we wanted to convey, a house as a place of constant enjoyment.