Project: House in Alto Verde
Architects: Estudio Giraudo
Location: Cevil Redondo, Argentina
Area: 2, 314 sf
Year: 2023
Photographs by: Marcos Núñez
Casa en Alto Verde emerges as an architectural wonder, thoughtfully crafted to challenge contemporary notions of habitation and construction. Located in the captivating landscape of Cevil Redondo, near Yerba Buena, Argentina, this single-family housing project redefines the way we live and build. Deliberately separated into two levels, the ground floor hosts vibrant social spaces, while the upper floor cradles serene bedrooms. Casa en Alto Verde stands not only as a transformative architectural masterpiece but as an invitation to engage in a profound dialogue with its breathtaking surroundings, harmoniously blending light, space, and nature.
The architectural object in question arises, in part, from reflection and, in part, from criticism of the ways of inhabiting and constructing habitat in contemporaneity. It gains value from the opportunity to think and also allows (us) to rethink the dialectic of the question: How are things done? And even more so: How should we do them?
In that sense, Casa en Alto Verde is a single-family housing project located in the grouping that gives it its name, in the commune of Cevil Redondo, near the town of Yerba Buena, province of Tucumán, Argentina.
The housing is organized based on a program separated into two levels. The ground floor has mostly social spaces, while the upper floor houses the bedrooms with their respective services.
The consequence is perceived from the outside: The upper level materializes as a predominantly opaque volume, composed of a series of planes with varied textures, practically suspended (supported only by a combination of slender metal columns and a few lower planes). While transparency predominates on the lower level.
From there, there is an intention to dematerialize the vertical boundaries of the work; the walls rise to a height of two meters, creating a strip of light that separates the ground floor from the mezzanine slab. The upper volume rests on a concrete strip that runs horizontally and separates both levels by a difference in air and light, of the possibility of inhabiting the interior perceiving the landscape framed in the horizon.
The ground floor functions around a large continuous space, where the most recurrent activities of the daily life of a typical family coexist: cooking, eating, and socializing merge into the same environment. This wide spatial continuum is achieved through a material operation: the continuity of the visible slab on the ceiling, a single-material cementitious flooring that accompanies the visitor from the outside to the inside, and a subtle operation of hiding the metal columns among the aluminum carpentry.
The upper floor occupies only a portion of the surface of the housing, leaving room for the entry of natural light through the openings in the reinforced concrete structure, between beams, but in the absence of slabs. Functionally, it translates into a sequence of rooms where rational order prevails. Here, the use of materiality is fundamental to achieving widely illuminated spaces, opaque planes create intimacy while translucent ones allow the entry of light.
The resulting object transforms the landscape, while the landscape enters the work and becomes part of it. It becomes an exploratory artifact of sensations, where light transforms each space over time. A place to inhabit through dialogue with its surroundings.
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