AA2241 House
AA2241 is the winning project of the House Competition 2009, financed anually by a ruffle that is organized by the Travel Group of the University of the Republic, in Montevideo. The house is the main prize in the ruffle. The rules of the competition required a 1400 sq ft urban single family house in a plot between party walls, 32 ft wide and 98 ft deep. They also requiered that the house should be fully accesible, energy efficient, and have flexibility of use.
OBJECTIVES
The project is defined by four elements: - the party walls (common bricks painted white) - the roof (a concrete slab) - a central yard (with a mobile glass roof) - vertical filters (aluminum shutters and glass windows) Under the roof, the architectural program. The ground is taken by different events that are presented by the project, under the roof and outside of it. Spatiality is neutral, open, integral, horizontal, and long. Spaces relate between themselves and deploy new spaces, by grouping or connecting. The house is amplified. It opens and closes calmly to one side or the other. It adapts to different ways of inhabiting, different times, and different seasons. Facades transform into spatial diafragms, that filter and delimit the various states. They amplify, compress and protect. The central yard has a mobile roof, a solution that is traditional in Montevideo’s standard houses, typical from the first decades of the 20th century. The central yard, apart from being space of transition, is also used as an energetic device (‘greenhouse’). It warms or cools interior spaces and offers multiple uses for the house and for the yard itself, achieving new configurations. Public-private spaces of domestic life are defined in a horizontal sequence. Schematically, three areas contain the program: At the front, the social spaces. In the middle, bathrooms, barbecue, storage space and the central yard (‘greenhouse’). At the back, the private spaces (bedrooms). The program is open, allowing intermediate configurations.
PERFORMANCE
The house that never was. Transformed into a social facility, a party or event room, the house gathers hundreds of people every month. The projected flexibility of use overcame the expectations. The program changed completely. Minimum and reversible modifications where made to the building. The original spatial proposal remains. It stands the transformation. The house is uninhabited, attended by an ephemeral audience, guests, users. It became infrastructure. The city took it.
