Venturini House. Buenos Aires, Argentina
The house is located close to the Abasto Market, nowadays converted into a commercial centre. Like the market, the place where the Venturini family presently lives has homed a variety of different uses. At the time of the construction it functioned as a house of rent. Its organization responded to a very common typology in the city of Buenos Aires.
Small houses were located towards the interior of the block, whereas the one belonging to the owner was the facade to the street. The devaluation of this part of the city towards the middle of last century brought about the occupation of the main house, being transformed as a result into a tenement house.
Our intervention can be summarized in three actions: extraction, redescription and addition. The first of them meant the recovery of the original spatial structure. The second phase of the project was based simply on marking again each of the spaces in order to adapt the existing structure to a contemporary way of life.
Finally, the last action consisted in two precise additions. The first of these was the materialization of a mezzanine floor which allowed simultaneously covering a yoga room in the basement and giving support to an exterior expansion for the living room. At last, the construction of a light structure for multiple uses on the roof made visible the optimism that follows the revalue of the city as a way of new crowning for the property.
