M 5605 - Argentina

About the project

Powerful Elegance

The six-story apartment building with ten units was built on a floor area of 8.8 by 12.7 square meters. The floor plans on the standard stories are compact: Each features an open kitchen, a living and dining room, a bedroom and sanitary rooms.

What doesn’t sound spectacular is actually an extraor­dinary piece of building culture that impresses with visual succinctness and a good amount of cleverness.

The house occupies a corner plot in northwest Bue­nos Aires. And this corner has something special: Like curious neighbors leaning out of the window, peri­scope-like balconies grow out of the façade and stretch out in different directions. The impression is captivating because they are closed at the sides, top and bottom – like loggias, tapering towards the front, providing a view through glass parapets to the fully glazed “rear walls” of the trapezoidal oriels. This expressive element not only gives the house a unique identity, but also of­fers residents a shaded outdoor area and weaves it into the public space.

Large windows rounding the corners are incised in the façade level. Here the boundary between inside and outside is clearly articulated. On the ground floor, how­ever, the cantilevered element is reversed, inviting the public space into the house: The entrance is set back under the corner and the resulting overhang forms the threshold. One can look directly through the entrance door into the foyer, where the façade brick continues as interior wall cladding and the threshold theme is played out once again. Rounding it all off is a car parking space eased into the ground floor and demarcated by lattices – and here, too, the exterior and interior space intertwine.

"It looks like a tower or like a sculpture."