Excerpt: Rincon House, designed by Estudio Galera, is the first of a group of rental houses located near the beaches of Ostede, a historical coastal town which used to experience a time of great splendour. Rincon House redefines this style and adjusts the materiality to current technology. The design has a monolithic appearance that creates a formal simplicity of great visual value.
Project Description
Part of a whole
[Text as submitted by architect] Rincon House is the first of a group of rental houses located near the beaches of Ostede, a historical coastal town which used to experience a time of great splendour. The town gradually lost its condition of a vacation city to the neighbouring cities of Pinamar, Valeria del Mar and Cariló. Ostende thus turned into the city with the largest permanent living population –mostly, working class- of the County. Its geographical, historical and social features are portrayed in an architecture that reflects contemporaneity with signs of formal and material austerity.
The main challenge was to project six houses in topographically varied adjacent lots within a hybrid concept that highlights a single-family house in an independent lot at the time that specific conceptual characteristics reinforce the idea of the whole.
Typological reformulations
The house forges a bond with its surroundings. The existing residences represent the popular brick chalet of Pinamar Of in the ‘80s and mid-’90s characterised by a principal body with exposed raked-joint bricks, wood millwork and big sloped roofs. Rincon House redefines this style and adjusts the materiality to current technology.
Intended for a generic user, the house minimises the bedroom area so as to maximise the resources used in meetings and leisure ones. The barbecue area closes the living/dining room area at the time which works as an interior/exterior nexus, deconstructing –gradually-the architectural box.
The non-built void is the main space of the project
The house hallmark allows cutting the lot in portions on both sides and thus creates a constrained space of ownership to the rear façade and a containment of the main access.
The space on the rear façade is an important aspect of the project, both to the individual residence and to its concept as part of the whole. This space consists of a garden of aged trees –rare in a sand dune environment- which was left unaltered to provide a ‘natural shelter’ for leisure.The form and location of the house have close views from the two streets.
The house is a contrast between nature and artificiality from a formal and chromatic stand
The house lifts off the ground creating a sensorial dynamism at the time that prevents the erosion of the masonry when it touches the ground. The need for privacy in the bedroom turned out in an articulated proposal:a partition of the programme maximising the perimeter and focusing on the sunlight and views from the fenestrations. In other words,a stratified volumetric scheme opened on its longitudinal side and closed to the busiest street and future neighbours.
The double slop on the roofs opens the space to the exterior, maximising the entry of sunlight during the morning and afternoon. The materiality was selected -after various tests- for several reasons. First, its monolithic appearance creates a formal simplicity of great visual value. Furthermore, the fact that local craftsmen dominate the masonry trade contributed to the choice of common bricks as the main material in the construction.
A double bearing wall made of common brick with an air chamber solves the thermal, waterproofing and structural needs of the project at the time that reduces the cost of maintenance to the minimum.
The different brick bond types create games of lights and shadows, hide service elements –such as air conditioning condensers- and resolve differences in boundaries, porosities and reliefs without losing their formal chromatic homogeneity.
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