Casa Transparente
On a small plot of land on the Uruguayan coast of Balneario Buenos Aires, 15 km from Punta del Este, we decided to build a house where we could raise a child and raise a family. From Punta del Este, we decided to build a house where we could raise a child and start a family. A house for the best moment of life.
Anticipating the post-pandemic migratory movement from the Big City to the coastal suburbs, we found in the proximity to the sea the ideal context in which to experience first-hand some concepts regarding domestic architecture that we have been working on for some time.
The need to shorten construction times as much as possible in order to have a "roof" as soon as possible and the fact of having a limited budget that defined in advance the surface area to be built could have been limiting factors when it came to designing. But they were not.
They served as triggers to define project strategies to build a 45 m2 home that is far from being perceived as small as any equivalent mono-room in one of the capitals of the Río de La Plata.
A set of small project decisions have the common objective of maximising spatial and interior circulatory continuity, on the one hand, and completely blurring the visual limit with the surroundings, on the other.
The layout of the sanitary core is detached from both the façades and the roof of the house to favour continuous circulation around it. We revised the historical relationship between the bathroom and the rest of the house, in order to assume its use as a daily routine and turn it into a learning tool for our son.
The design of all the elements that make up the interior fittings are as light and transparent as possible. The kitchen unit, which is not perceived as such, was built with leftover deck board, where the spice jars are camouflaged with the vegetation of the garden.
This combination of strategies means that living in the 45 m2 is never perceived as a constraint to the development of daily life. On the contrary, it invites us to share time together and grow as a family.
With the exception of the base, the construction was made entirely of wood, combining the use of species of different hardness, texture and surface treatment.
The main skeleton of Multilaminated Eucalyptus was custom-made in a workshop. The number of cuts made on site was limited to only those necessary to make the interlocking joints between pieces, which in turn considerably reduced material waste and shortened construction times on site.
The house is almost entirely clad in glass panels: the structure and all its component parts are completely exposed. In this way the construction system and its own compositional logic are transformed into a language.
In summer, the strategic arrangement of opening windows on the four facades of the house allows for internal cross ventilation thanks to the ocean breezes. While in winter, the double-glazed envelope of the house's
