Incomplete House / estudio relativo

Curated by Danae Santibañez

Architects: estudio relativo
Area: 250 m²
Year: 2013
Photographs:Ramiro Sosa
Manufacturers: Fisa metal, Italnova, Retak

Text description provided by the architects. It is a house for a young couple, located in a closed neighborhood in the outskirts of Santa Fe. The loan meant the opportunity to promote a first instance of construction, allowing an early occupation of the property. In this first stage, a series of coordinated extensions would gradually happen in each case according to the emerging priorities of its occupants. The peculiarities of the loan, allowed interpreting it as an appropriate scenario in which to test growth hypotheses and adaptations of the domestic space to the progressive re-configuration of the family scene.

Therefore, the dynamics of the contemporary family, with its incorporations and ruptures as an indeterminate project, in permanent process, so that the search for a definitive scheme is avoided in a conscious way: a plan that determines once and for all and forever the character of the construction and the destiny of the spaces. Instead, it proposed a strategy of implementation, a constructive-spatial system of atomic, cellular, devoid of hierarchies and rhizomatic and indefinite growth. Thus housing (in this case), as a living organism, accompanies and adapts to the family nucleus in transit through its multiple ages, settling in from the planning stages of work in a condition of permanently unfinished, to be done, to reinvent itself .

The proposed system consists of a series of modules whose dimension characteristics suggest the types of use (social or intimate 'cells') and support 'cells' for both interior spaces and for outdoor and semi-covered spaces. In all cases, it was sought, in function of operationalizing the design to maximize the contact of each cell with an outer space; and minimize the contact of the cells with each other, being the most optimal, through the opening of a door. In this way the 'cells' acquire independence and privacy, while multiplying the options of growth and dispersion.

We imagine the structure in another time, already occupied by other habitants; wearing medical offices, student pension, social club; attaching new modules and isolating oneself a thousand times and in a thousand different ways; as a structure of programmable (and unprogrammable) occupation , decharacterized or without recognizable face. A piece of neighborhood micro-urbanism affected by the block, more than a singular piece of architecture. A proposal of constructive and social fabric.