Architects: Horacio Cherniavsky, Viviana Pozzoli, Gabriela Ocampos, Franco Pinazzo, Rolph Vuyk
Built Surface: 115 m²
Construction Completion Year: 2021
Location: Asuncion, Paraguay
Photographer: Federico Cairoli
Email: contacto@federicocairoli.com
Landscaping: Lucila Garay
Table, chairs, and living room set: Saccaro
Smithy: Gabriel González
Carpentry: Marcial Careaga
Glasses: Orlando Zacarias
About Studio
Equipo de Arquitectura‘s vision of architecture is primitive and essential. Primitive due to its conceptual relationship to the origin of architecture and essential to avoid relationships with the unnecessary. They work with matter, transform it and arrange it in different ways to create spaces.
They treat light as a material that intensifies and shapes not only the space, but the materials that create it. They understand the order as a generator of the projects, starting from the organization as the beginning of the process. Thus, the plan and the cut maintain a legible logic, like a score for musicians.
Between the public and the private, the open and the closed, the inside and the outside, the mobile and the fixed, the light and the penumbra, the natural and the artificial, the artisanal and the industrial, between boundaries is the living space. from a great friend.
Architecture is a profession that intermediates the needs of living with the transformation of matter. Architects become intermediaries in that will to power.
It is curious how ideas exist in an immaterial, ethereal world, but they manifest themselves in the material, with the matter. The construction process mediates those antagonistic universes, between trial and error, between expectations and reality.
Standing on the shoulders of giants means standing in the middle of the progress of the past and the development of the future, an unavoidable task if we assume that Architecture is the history of continuity.
With Kahn, we learned that structural support can become functional support, which is why the entire roof of the house rests on the furniture that makes up the perimeter of the plot. This double function is applicable to space, where the social and the private are intermingled according to use. The functional flexibility of the house adjusts to the interchangeable condition of the ways of living, where the user of the house becomes the architect of these transformations.
With the local vernacular constructions, we understood that the favorite space in a house is the intermediate space, a stage to receive and share. The unfired earth, in the form of manually pressed bricks, is stacked on walls, filters, and vaults to build that intermediate space, where natural ventilation crosses and the limits between interior and exterior are diluted.
In the center of a 190 m2 lot, a mango tree stands between the two blocks that are physically separated, but visually connected, achieving spatial integration from the front filter wall to the back wall. A built space of 115 m2, which is transformed by filters, doors, and blinds, responds to the existenzminimum from a local, subtropical perspective.
Finding the midpoint between the industrial and the artisanal is part of the recognition of the available resources, where the balance between the two produces a technological amalgamation that generates alternatives to conventional construction techniques. Cutting the compacted earth block in half became the construction strategy for the reinforced vaults that make up the roof. The channels resulting from cutting the blocks function as formwork for the reinforcements that receive a fine load of concrete so that they work together.
These project criteria and their corresponding materialization, which range from the manufacture of the raw material to the design of the furniture mechanism, reflect the attempt to find a synthesis between the project and its construction.