Pingüino House / Estudio Galera

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Text description provided by the architects. Casa Pinguino is a vacation residence in the tourist town of Carilo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, designed to accommodate a variety of restful activities while being austere in the use of available resources.

The exchange process with the clients focused on studying the imagined activities in a summer house rather than a preconceived architectural form. Discussions about customs, sensations, desires, and tastes replaced the usual initial exchanges regarding the number of bedrooms, square meters, and aspects related to the appearance of the building.

From the owners' admiration for traditional Japanese architecture, certain concepts were reformulated for use in the house.

A terrain without major topographical accidents allowed for a house with a strong relationship with the lot through a semi-covered gallery. The house is linearly oriented in three parallel strata to the boundary axes, placing services in the least favorable orientation to protect and open the main environments and the gallery towards the north.

The relaxed guidelines related to the use of the house made it possible to think about the spaces and their appropriation in a less rigid way, allowing for flexibility in both space and time.

Flexibility in space is linked to the indeterminacy of the environments and the movable elements that allow for quickly changing the arrangement between a large meeting space and a living room with a closed bedroom. Both aluminum and wood carpentry allow for rapid modifications of the space, connecting the covered modules with the semi-covered modules. By expanding the usable space and doubling the kitchen area by linking it to the grill area, an easy summer transformation of the space and its possibilities of use is generated.

Flexibility in time is related to the multiple possibilities of expansion, supported by a regular and modular scheme that allows for the appearance of new bathrooms and bedrooms in the future in continuity with the layers of use. Casa Pinguino is an informal and flexible temporary residence with the potential to grow and transform into a traditional distribution house if the demand requires it. It is an operable spatial proposal that emerges from the interpretation of a particular way of life, allowing for adaptations to current and future demands. Indefiniteness in ways of living requires versatility in the formal definition of 'house'.

The main use of wagon space is the result of the proximity encounter of the three basic compositional elements: service, gallery, and roof. The roof becomes volumetric, connecting the main wagon with a flexible-use mezzanine that functions as the children's bedroom and ends in a terrace that allows for visual participation in the semi-covered area corresponding to the barbecue area.

The materiality and applied technologies were defined by different factors, such as the materials and labor available to perform the work. The area has a long history of woodworking roofs, so Casa Pinguino allows us to rethink the inclined roof in Pinamar. The goal was to synthesize it by avoiding unnecessary construction complexities, seeking a connection with the local built heritage, and incorporating a rational vision for the application of this technology. On the exterior, the wood that is omnipresent in the interior disappears in search of low maintenance. Only glass, concrete, and sheet metal are exposed to the elements.

After adopting the technology of concrete for the construction of the gallery and sheet metal for the roof, a sheet metal formwork system was developed for the pouring of concrete in the service wagon. In this way, the elements interact with each other through relationships of form, geometry, color, and materiality.

Casa Pinguino is simple in appearance but seeks to respond to complex and changing demands. It is a formal quest that explores contemporary aesthetics while presenting certain references to the history of the place. It is a project conceived to exploit the material and human resources of the area. But above all, it is a house that proposes without imposing, that changes according to the user's needs in times when the pace of social transformations far exceeds the lifespan of buildings.