In a modest 210 sqm plot of land on a corner, in Mar Azul, a seashore town in Argentina, eight blocks away from the sea, rises H3, a minimum tread house designed by Luciano Kruk to make the most of the parcel’s dimensions and the natural surroundings. The commissioners were 3 sisters with each of their families wishing for a shared summer house with a limited budget.
H3 was completely built in exposed concrete, which served well to the maintenance moderation. Intending to keep the needs for equipment at a minimum, even furniture was conceived as a part of the concrete volume. Pine planks were used to set the formwork so that the partitions as well as the slabs would preserve the texture of the wood veins in an attempt to establish a harmonious dialogue with the bark of the local trees.
The house was constituted as a compact block. The ground floor houses the kitchen, the dining room and the living room, all in an integrated space from which the staircase emerges towards the first floor. Given the house’s scale, the use of crossed views and vanishing points aimed at unifying and fluidifying the space in the room.
Instead of confining the house’s different uses into separated rooms, they have been connected with each other, aiming at producing the general feeling of spatial expansion. As requested on the brief, the bedrooms and the bathroom were located upstairs, but the main bedroom’s outdoor semi-covered space was designed to be shared with the secondary bedroom. Additionally, it would partially work as the roof for the downstairs deck.
As the corridor and the serving facilities were set to the side next to the neighboring lot, the main windows were set on the house’s more private rear, allowing the dwelling to open towards the outside deck and calling for the conservation of the original trees.
Overhangs and partitions preserve the house both from the effects of water and the sight from the streets. While the sidewalls are mainly blind, the front upstairs show the blind volume housing the bathroom and the high windows of the main bedroom, under which a storeroom lies inside. On the rear, floor-to-ceiling windows connect both windows with the outdoor deck they share.
Design and info © Luciano Kruk
Images © Daniela Mac Adden
