DESCRIPTIVE MEMORY
By the end of the nineteenth century, a new type of building appeared within the city grid: the general store. This kind of stores usually had a series of adjacent rooms expanding into an internal patio with a gallery, and consequently, they connected work and housing functionally in the same plot of land.
They normally completed the block fabric by closing the corners at the municipal lines. These enclaves were built by immigrants who used the construction techniques inherited from their countries of origin.
This type of stores eventually shut down due to changes in the customs of the society, which preferred other ways of provisioning, as well as to the physical and cultural disappearance of their former founders.
In most cases, such stores were gradually abandoned while progress together with the advance of horizontal property put this interesting typology in danger
of disappearing.
The intervention in Paysandú is not intended to go further than what it is: A construction which used to be a store and a casa chorizo (sausage-house, a typical sort of construction from Buenos Aires), that is, an existing mass which is undermined and where a new spatial modular structure is introduced by adding a lightweight pavillion.
The strategy consisted in preserving the existing volumetry and the outer cover (bearing walls, vault slabs, beams, etc.) by reformulating and adapting a new structural metal system of columns and beams, as well as by using walls made of concrete blocks as part of the system in the shape of an enclosing, and thus generating a contrast between all that is existing and new together with a diversity of spatial situations and, in such way, recovering the weight of history
contrasted with modernity.
The modular partition of the spaces based on the structural system results in the repetition of 4 multiple-use spaces or studios as well as in a fifth space at the corner, where the old arrangement around the iinternal patio is preserved and completed with the lightweight pavillion over such existing structure to which 3 other spaces or units are added with a different spatial conception.
The use of raw materials and the way in which they are arranged in the space led to generate systems of lights and shadows in the common spaces which mimic and incorporate the units.
