Description

Urban context

Rosario, located three hundred kilometers northwest of Buenos Aires on the
western bank of the Paraná, has a million residents, making it the third-largest
city in Argentina. Nearly the entire urban region is characterized by a
continuous block structure of densely built, closed street facades of the same
height. One block west of the river this fourteen-story residential building
fills a gap in a closed line of buildings.

Ground-floor zone

The vertical structure of the space occupies only a small area on the ground
floor. As one approaches the building, the entrance is undeterminable at first.
Access is controlled by a patio-like entrance area and guarded by a sliding
door. Opening up behind a half-height wall is a small green garden in the middle
of the stony city, as an antithesis to its urban surroundings. Stone slabs on
the lawn lead to an entrance terrace and further into the building to the
stairwell and elevators.

Building structure

Eight loft-like apartments, some on two stories, are organized on fourteen
floors. The floor plan is very deep. An L-shaped spatial layer is arranged
around an outdoor terrace that functions as the central distribution point:
located here are the front doors to the apartments, and an elevator in the back
of the building feeds into this area as well. Several of the apartments have an
extra room that can only be accessed from this terrace. Hence the individual
rooms are not assigned a particular function, and there are not clearly defined
boundaries between inside and outside, private and communal.

Facade

The parts of the building that form the architecture seem to be decoded: walls
dissolve into beams, transform into windows and doors, are staggered diagonally,
at once delimiting and opening the space. The dynamic spatial continuum produces
a play of light and shadow in all-white architecture, blurring the boundaries
between inside and outside. The emergence of an architecture based on visual
relationships is experienced sequentially. The nearby river and the urban
cityscape are integrated optically into the living environment by means of
diagonally directed, framed views. This slender residential tower fills the gap
in the heterogeneous slab of buildings in a filigreed and highly abstract
way.

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Originally published in: Ulrike Wietzorrek, Housing+: On Thresholds, Transitions, and Transparencies, Birkhäuser, 2014.