Vegetable House
Facundo S. López
ARCHITECTS
Facundo S. López
LEAD ARCHITECT
Facundo S. López
LANDSCAPE
Flux Estudio
COLLABORATORS
Juan Sebastián Sayar, Victoria Ramos, Mariquena Betcher
PHOTOGRAPHS
Luis Barandiarán
AREA
62 m²
LOCATION
Arana, Argentina
YEAR
2022
CATEGORY
Houses
This house involves a technological exploration based on wood and thatch materials and seeks a sustainable, fast and low-budget construction. It appeals to constructive and spatial types that can be traced in the history of vernacular architecture, articulating with contemporary materials and construction processes.
This house represented a completely new challenge within the author's practice: thinking about his own house. Designing it was, however, the return to an old exercise, carried out in each of the houses he has built for other people, of imagining his own home.
He must combine twenty years of initiation in the field of discipline, a bar that sometimes seems too high to himself.
Those previous designs had different shapes, themes, and materials throughout those twenty years. They were placed in forests, urban neighborhoods, or mountainous terrains, but never on the plain. The place finally chosen, by chance, is a field that will very slowly become a suburban area of the Argentinean city of La Plata.
A corner of 2,000 sq. Mt., between a railway track devoured by vegetation, the fence of a small airport, and a void of country houses and empty plots that separates the area from the most urban areas of the city. On the first visits to the site, long before there be streets or electrical power, cows graze and birds fly.
Previous ideas are left behind: a latín American megaron, a house over pilotis as in Chiloé, a Spaniard patio of orange trees, or an intihuatana for the nights.
Once again by chance, a very light roof appears, which takes advantage of a small industry that flourishes in our cities: thatched roofs. It will be an ephemeral house, not designed to last forever. This finitude ends up freeing the architect from past pretensions. A house will be made just for the present.
Some teachers point the way: a double roof for these increasingly less temperate climates. Below, is a wooden box, designed from the organization of the materials offered by the industry and the economy of resources, which are particularly scarce here.
The box moves a little with respect to the thatched roof, and in this offset, we return to a recurring idea, now very favorable on this plain: the ranch gallery.
The construction system is inherited from architectures that have little to do with the plain, but that in the present are hybridized through hypertextual cobwebs and books that smell old: it is both the wood frame of North American homes and the Japanese minka, or the artificial fauna from the pampas of Glenn Murcutt.
A house that continues with a logic that occurred in some previous ones from the author: a house entirely made of one type of material: wood and plant fibers. No longer a cave, but a cabin, or perhaps a forest: the thatched roof has a structure with eucalyptus props and willow stringers and braces, all brought from diverse provinces of Argentina.
The foundations for the house, also made of hardwood, were recycled from old railroad sleepers. The structure is made of implanted pine. The envelope is made of plywood panels and the floor is made of a harder variant of local wood, eucalyptus rostrata.
