House in the Countryside / Luciano Kruk Arquitectos
House in the Countryside / Luciano Kruk Arquitectos
Text description provided by the architects. House in the Countryside is located on a one-hectare lot in the town of Cañuelas. In a rural environment, where the landscape presence of the Pampas plain is strongly imposed.
Our clients are a couple with a ten-year-old son who enjoy living in the countryside and being in contact with nature and wanted to move to a practical and functional house, requiring little maintenance and with a stripped-back aesthetic that would allow them to fully enjoy the environment. They requested a house where the use of each square meter would be optimized to the maximum with the aim of building the smallest surface possible to accommodate the required uses: two bedrooms, an office and a social area.
The strategy arises from focusing on the interest generated by the power of the landscape of the Pampas plains. The omnipresence of the horizon, of the extension of the uninterrupted, infinite plain, and the enormous, immense sky, that occupies the entire visual space and is enhanced by the sporadic presence of some groups of trees.
The project is structured around the intention of enhancing the horizontality of the landscape, exaggerating it, by generating a completely linear house. Having a large plot of land gave us the possibility to locate and orientate the project with total freedom. We decided then, to generate the main façade completely oriented towards the north towards where each of the rooms that make up the house is turned.
The house extends into the landscape through a gallery. This gallery has a lower height than the interior of the house, which accentuates the horizontality of the project and, in turn, provides greater protection from solar incidence in the summer months.
The south facade, on the other hand, is a more closed facade, with a continuous upper window that is interrupted only at the point of access to the house.
The layout generates a large social area in the center of the house and groups the child’s bedroom at one end next to the office (which will be used by him) and at the other end the parents’ room. In this way, the private areas are well separated from each other, granting privacy to them.
Unlike previous projects, where the structure seeks to generate large distances between supports, in this house, a succession of square section columns located a short distance from each other on the north façade was proposed. In this way, it seeks to accentuate the horizontality of the project through the repetition of a homogeneous rhythm.
In turn, the repetition of regular columns refers to the classic resource of the country house with its gallery supported by a series of columns. In this case, the columns are located inside the house, therefore a virtual limit is generated prior to the glass that frames the landscape that is perceived as infinite through the regular repetition of vertical elements. The columns structure the façade and their separation does not reveal the different sizes of the premises since their enclosures are independent of this façade system.
The vertical elements are also repeated on the south façade through a series of partitions that hold storage elements under the horizontal continuous window that runs through the project from end to end. In this way, the house is perceived from the outside as a horizontal artifact with a regular modulation that is interrupted only on the south façade by means of an oblique plane to generate access.
