CASA ATTRAVERSO IL PATIO

Ramiro Sosa

• Architects

To pass through something. To be passed through by something. Passing through implies displacement, an experience constructed over time. Daily, in one way or another, we inhabit those journeys. Gabi prepares to initiate a new path and, in that project, the house assumes a special role: it constitutes itself as the medium that makes that journey possible.

Between the threshold of the street and the pre-existing house on the site, a trajectory of about twenty-five steps can be described. In the middle of these two universes — one public and one private — a void unfolds: a courtyard that is passed through daily, perhaps several times. We began to imagine it as a device capable of transforming that transit into a daily experience, both for Gabi and for those who arrive at or leave her house. An experience built from the senses: textures and colors that change with the seasons, birds and insects that accompany those cycles, perfumes that invade or disappear, the ground covered with leaves, and the water, still or in motion, reflecting the sky and everything that happens around.

The project recovers a pre-existing two-story construction, leaning against the southwest and located a few meters from the back of the site, and incorporates a new volume on a single level that slots in and advances towards the east. The original piece is remodeled to cluster the private and service rooms, allowing the most intimate area to function independently. From each space, small escapes towards the domestic landscape materialize. The new volume houses the social areas under the premise of opening up and integrating completely into the courtyard. The interior atmospheres also link a personal narrative built by Gabi through her collection of artworks. In this way, the house, its intermediate spaces, and the courtyard form a single continuum, which proposes to us to turn each step into a daily experience, where the landscape invades the interior and projects itself into it.

The materiality reinforces this condition. The original construction, whose expression hides the traditional construction system of the area — plastered common brick masonry — is perceived as a neutral volume in contrast with the new intervention resolved in exposed concrete. There, the limits and the structure are individualized, expressing the diverse plastic qualities that the material allows.

This work ponders the bond with the domestic landscape from multiple dimensions. The courtyard is not understood as an expansion of the interior in those moments of benign weather, but as a device that challenges us and provokes experiences from the most daily occurrences. The courtyard transforms, thus, into the place where architecture and landscape build a shared experience; a vehicle from which to travel through daily life and, above all, to let ourselves be passed through by the stimuli that nature proposes.