Residence in Los Quebrachos San Luis / CMS arquitectas

Architects: CMS arquitectas
Location: San Luis, Argentina
Draft Architects: Melina Spinetta, Leonardo Donati
Design Team: CMS arquitectas (Chiatello Diana, Matiasevich Paula y Spinetta Melina)
Area: 649.0 m2
Project Year: 2016
Photograph: Walter Salcedo

Construction Company: Empresa constructora PDT SRL San Luis
Structural Calculation: Ing. Osvaldo Belzunce
Covered Built Surface : 578 m2
Semi Covered Built Surface : 71 m2

Text description provided by the architects. The residence is found inside the district Los Quebrachos in the extreme northwest of the city of San Luis (Argentina). It is a permanent home for a family consisting of a couple with three small children at the time of construction. During the design process there were very specific requests that the program had to incorporate. The most important, because of its scope and nature, was to have a large enclosed space for recreation activities and some sporting practices due to the limitations imposed by the Chorrillero wind for activities in open spaces.

The characteristics of the lot and its surroundings were considered as determinants of the formal, functional and material definition of the project. The most important ones are:

Location of the land at the foot of the mountain and with three views to be explored: mountain of the Cross, city of San Luis and golf square of the neighborhood;
Sloping ground 3 meters in east-west diagonal direction;
Habitual and intense presence, due to the proximity of the mountain range, the Chorrillero wind that blows from the north;
Existence of native vegetation on the ground, mostly trees with little structure and shrubs;
Zone of average probability of seismic tremors.

Once the requirements and constraints were consolidated, the criteria that guided the design decisions were established:

Find the free tree sectors to decide the implantation space of the house. Preserve the existing native tree groups and minimize the extraction of specimens;
Take advantage of the unevenness of the terrain so that, when having two plants, the lower one is semi-buried and at the level of the sidewalk and, in the upper plant, at the highest level of the bottom of the ground;
Division of the program into 2 sectors: living space itself and volume of leisure and recreation. Both with functionality, access and independent traffic and, in turn, with communication views.

The used materials are the apparent concrete in the upper dimension volume and the San Luis dark gray stone as a base in the lower level of the terrain. Both materials respond to the requirements of minimal maintenance and good behavior in earthquakes.

The visual connections between spaces through large glazed surfaces is a constant: the glances can pass from one space to the other, and can cross several spaces to get the views of the surrounding environment. These visual connections in multiple senses, which at the same time don’t neglect the intimacy of spaces, are those that give a unitary character to a program, which, despite being a single-family dwelling, is very complex.