Casa BLQ

Casa BLQ meets the street with a blank concrete façade floating above a band of windows at ground level, bisected by the diagonal of an articulated, enclosed stair. The 200-square-meter (about 2,200-square-foot), two-story house located in a gated community between Buenos Aires and La Plata, Argentina, was designed by local architect Luciano Kruk as a permanent residence for a couple and their two children.

“The location of the staircase in a two-story house is always key,” Kruk says. The foyer and concrete stair, the defining feature of the house’s south elevation, are wrapped in frosted glass—providing privacy from passersby—while the curtainwall for the remainder of the ground floor façade is transparent.

The house’s seemingly taut rectangular geometry isn’t quite pure: The eastern elevation is slightly inflected in plan to match the angled property line of the suburban plot.

Glass dominates the north façade (the primary source of solar heat gain in the Southern Hemisphere), with concrete brise-soleil fins on the second floor set perpendicular to the concrete volume.

The main spaces on both floors are oriented toward the backyard. The ground level’s open plan encompasses kitchen, dining, and living spaces, with somewhat more private spaces for a powder room and office at the east end. An almost 2-meter (6.6-foot) overhang of the second floor on the north side protects these spaces from direct sunlight, while covering part of the terrace as well as an outdoor cooking and eating area adjacent to the kitchen. On the upper level, a hallway parallel to the concrete stair connects three bedrooms, with bathrooms at each end. The master bedroom to the east opens onto a terrace.

Two parallel concrete beams, 20 centimeters wide by approximately 70 centimeters tall (roughly 8 by 28 inches), run the full 15-meter (about 50-foot) length of the house. Spaced 4 meters (about 13 feet) apart, these exposed structural elements are supported both by the exterior walls and by interior partition walls. This structural layout facilitates the open plan on the ground floor, and permitted Kruk freedom in expressing the front and rear faces of the house.

The exterior composite walls consist of a 15-centimeter-thick (about 6-inch-thick) cast-in-place concrete exterior and an interior wythe of 10-centimeter-thick (about 4-inch-thick) masonry finished with painted plaster. All glazing is double pane, and a radiant-floor system provides the minimal heating required in Buenos Aires’ temperate climate.

The exposed concrete was formed using 10-centimeter-wide (roughly 4-inch-wide) horizontal pine boards, and then finished with a light wash of cement and milled white marble to mask imperfections without covering what Kruk refers to as “the expressive qualities of the concrete.”

While the design draws clear parallels with Le Corbusier’s later work in concrete, Kruk says Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was another important inspiration in the design’s “search for simplicity in the constructive and organizational solutions of the project, structural sincerity, transparency, and use of few materials.”

--Project Credits
Project: Casa BLQ, Nuevo Quilmes, Buenos Aires
Client: Withheld
Architect: Luciano Kruk
Project Manager: Ekaterina Künzel
Construction Manager: Pablo Magdalena
Collaborators: Andrés Conde Blanco, Belén Ferrand, Denise Andreoli, Dan Saragusti
Size: 200 square meters (approx. 2,200 square feet)
Cost: $280,000

This article appeared in ARCHITECT's October 2018 issue.