2024
MCHAP
EDIFICIO OCAMPO
Estudio Morton arquitectura y paisaje
Ituzaingo, Buenos Aires, Argentina
November 2022
PRIMARY AUTHOR
Diorella Andrea Fortunati (Project and construction management)
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
Carlos Alberto Tinnirello (Structural engineer), Nuria Mariel Jover (Drafter Architect), Daiana Agostina Ferreira Baiz (Project manager assistant), Cintia Viviana Caceres Kambic (Building installations advisor), Matias Godec (Image 4 Photographer
CLIENT
Ocampo Trust
PHOTOGRAPHER
Federico Kulekdjian
OBJECTIVE
One of our premises was a work respectful of its surroundings, that embraces the corner and rotates using the course of the day from its openings. Employing expansions, not only as functional but also morphological tools, we created alternating facades with movement and depth that allow different typologies on every floor, generating diverse and flexible ways of living: 7 of 13 apartments are different.
We yearn for a building that resembles people’s expectations of a home. Units are separated by voids instead of party walls, an adjustment module increases the social area according to dwellers and not just the number of bedrooms, and all of them have generous expansions no matter the value or total rooms of the unit, which represents for us a small strike to the real estate market. Most typologies also have a workspace. Unknowingly, the pandemic gave even more meaning to these areas that were initially flexible and today so necessary.
Using the qualities of reinforced concrete and natural disposition of the weight, the structural supports are reduced. The material is forced by bending it while we accommodate the weight in the center, freeing the ends, which are expressed in corbels and 10 ft cantilevered slabs, with ridiculous six inches of thicknesses. The vertical circulation system located in the center, made of the same material, becomes the foot of a balanced scale. Meanwhile, the formwork of wood boards and its stone color, manages to charge the element with a new meaning: “a heavy block that floats”.
CONTEXT
The city, more precisely, the suburbs of Buenos Aires province, is the context where the building is located. An area where utilities end and begin, where cables crowd the skies, next to deciduous tree crown tops on wide sidewalks, this is where the neighborhood of little houses with gardens live together with large real-estate developments. Ituzaingo, a scattered city 20 miles from Buenos Aires City, Argentina, has a changing and irregular skyline because of the constant modifications of the urban code that seeks to densify the area, continually altered by its components: those who sell their houses with new shadows spilled in the parks and those who project under a code that generates high-rise buildings separated by the required setbacks, of only six meters, from their future neighbor.
When we began the project in 2016 there were few high-rise constructions around, the orange-colored house that was bought to build Ocampo was the typical neighborhood house surrounded by gardens and vegetation, that we see increasingly less, of a middle-class family, that is also decreasing in our society.
In our country devaluation and inflation increase the construction cost monthly, that is why we are used to design with a budget.
In this context we were entrusted with a 21.528 ft2 multifamily building, with a flexible design of its apartments, urban furniture on ground floor and an underground parking lot, in a 5.618 ft2 corner lot.
In addition, the pandemic delayed the construction and changed life as we know it.
PERFORMANCE
Living in Ocampo is easy, life and exchange occur naturally. The common areas around the vertical circulation enable neighborly life, and I know this since I live in one of the apartments called Jacarandá.
The greatest contribution in a city where everything is private, where people next to us are a suspicion, was to give up the required setbacks of the ground floor to public use and provide it with vegetation, with support for city life to develop in it: a changing and low-maintenance flooring, a pond, planters, party walls bare of fences and covered with vines, areas semi-covered with concrete beams, drinking fountains, a continuous concrete bench which is now a resting place for elderly people or groups of friends and an access ramp, that is an extension of the sidewalk, has become a playground for bikes, tricycles, children running and skateboarders. A total area of 2,260 ft2 is now public that was previously private. This only proves how much these spaces are needed. It is a meeting point, a reference.
“I like to think that houses (from the Latin vivere: to exist, not to be dead) help us be ourselves, and that power should not be confined exclusively to interior design. Perhaps the envelope of our homes, as well as our skin, should adapt to our changes, to time, to our activities... but even more to our dreams, projections, loves, selfish habits, pets, friends, music, conversations, silent reading”.
This is exactly what living in Ocampo feels like.