Location: Mar Azul, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
Project: María Victoria Besonías, Guillermo de Almeida
Address: María Victoria Besonías, Guillermo de Almeida, Luciano Kruk
Photos: Daniela McAdden

Memory: María Victoria Besonías
Land area: 595 m2
Built surface: 90 m2
Year of construction: 2007

The place
Mar Azul is a seaside resort to 400 Km. to the south of the city of Buenos Aires, with an extensive beach of dunes and pristine a lush forest of conifers. The owners, members of the study, connoisseurs of years ago this place, they chose a field in the forest with a topography challenging, far from the sea, and in consequence of the area inhabited, to build a summer house whose presence does not hinder the impressive surrounding landscape remains the protagonist.

The proposal
The fact of having been able to experience in topics functional and aesthetic construction in this very particular-and the maritime forest - with another work recently built, the House of Blue Sea, and have obtained very satisfactory results, allowed in this opportunity, put the emphasis on perfecting the system experienced and resolve their adaptation to the peculiarity of the complex topography of the site chosen.

The search for alternatives should, as in the first experiment, continue to have few but insurmountable limitations: primarily have very low impact on the landscape, which is adjusted to a low budget, its subsequent maintenance was almost null and void, and that the construction time is acortase everything possible as the follow-up would be done at a distance.

With these assumptions, the house was resolved as by a prism of concrete proportion elongated and of minimum height, located taking advantage of a small plain natural in a field whose characteristic is relevant is the important slope diagonally (6m difference between a corner and the opposite of the lot) that it presents. Beyond this kind of natural terrace the slope becomes steeper and the pines begin to rouged. This location is modified just the profile of the dunes and do not interrupt the view from the batch boundary to the great surrounding landscape as in a short time from the immediate environment only see a floor (actually the roof of the house) covered the dry foliage of the pines is permanently renewal.

As the building is located parallel to the shorter side of the lot and the slope of the dune is oblique with respect to the orthogonal of the same the house is presented, half-buried in one of its corners and its foundations, exposed in the opposite. In such a way that the pure form, convincing, which covers the activities of summer seems to emerge from the dunes with two façades of well differentiated SO sunken in the sand with an opening that runs through it from end to end and whose height goes accompanying the slope of the dunes and the NON-fully glazed like a balcony that allows distant views, but at the same time partially protected the looks from the street for a few partitions “paravistas” that vary their position and quantity according to the environments they protect. The glass of this window raced in turn reflect the landscape when the house is viewed from the outside, and “create” and highlighted a series of vertical elements of much prominence trees (real and reflected, partitions “paravistas real and the mirror) that detract from the limelight to the prism pure of strong horizontal and that they offer as the observer moves ever-changing views of the house and the landscape that the blanket.

The functional organization
It is almost in the catalogue. On the facade balcony of the main areas one after the other joined by a deck. On the facade, sunken area, the bathrooms, the kitchen, and in the end that goes “desenterrándose”, the dining room. The house does not have an access key and while income for the area, most public must surely be that of regular use, you can also enter this dwelling flexible in its use, by any of the other environments. The furniture “concrete” which define the bedrooms are separated 0.70 m from the facade with glazed through two fixed panels that can be removed or replaced by doors in the case that you change the fate of the environments. With this resource in any place of the house can be to reconstruct the entirety of the façade and each environment is enlarged to visually because it extends into the adjacent one.