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Ode to Concrete – a House in Argentina

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Here’s a house that’s like a poem about concrete.

Every aspect of the BA House in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina is constructed using poured-in-place concrete.

The ubiquitous concrete is balanced by the warmth of rich dark wood shutters.

The concrete is used in amusing ways, as in forming this tiny horizontal window.

The nailed-together wooden forms that were used to pour its walls, barely held together.

Their brief struggle is immortalised in concrete.

Even the interior furnishings are poured from concrete, and then honed to a gleaming silvery patina.

It is used to form the kitchen counters – for a surprisingly robust and earthy effect.

The floors are polished to a rich and deep patina  – while the ceilings reveal the wooden forms used in making the concrete.

Another concrete form becomes the void that creates the swimming pool.

Amid all this focus on the solid materiality of concrete – the interior makes light solid too.

A glass box of light pours down from the sky into its central space.

The light is more than a skylight on a ceiling.

It becomes more like a solid cube of sunlight.

From one side of the light cube, only the light at bottom is revealed. Above it, you guessed: concrete.

At night, the shape inverts, as the black sky is crossed by a passageway of light.

A very interesting house.