A recent Pew Research Center poll of Americans with jobs that can be done remotely found that 60 percent of those working from home want to continue doing so when the pandemic is over. That’s great for the well-being of the workforce, but it also brings up a potential complication. As remote workers flee expensive cities around the world, demand for homes in rural areas is expected to rise, putting pressure on the few remaining undeveloped spaces we have left.

In Argentina, APS/Arquitectos Pablo Senmartin came up with a model for building houses in environmentally sensitive areas, adding to housing density without harming the ecosystem. Located in the picturesque Villa Parque Síquiman in the Cordoba province, “Bioclimatic House” takes advantage of beautiful views on a sloped parcel while barely touching the earth beneath it. The architects completed an in-depth study of current construction problems in natural areas and developed a building style that met the stringent requirements of LEED v4 sustainable housing certification.

The home is set within a mountainous area overlooking Lake San Roque, adjacent to a protected natural area. The area is characterized by extreme environmental fragility, with periods of long drought, wildfires, loss of native forest, and lack of infrastructure. But it also offers a beautiful setting with lots of opportunity for recreation, so it’s caught the eye of many Argentinians looking to relocate.

Instead of building onsite, the architects took advantage of prefabricated elements that can be dry-assembled quickly with minimal impact on the setting. At its base is a section they call “Plinth — the cave,” an earthquake-resistant structure made of reinforced concrete that allows water runoff beneath the building. It functions as a parking area and meditation space beneath a swimming pool. As the foliage grows up around it, it will virtually disappear within the landscape.

The home is accessed by a dock-like pier element at street level, which transforms into a terrace and solarium as it enters the house and terminates at the infinity-edge swimming pool, which visually blends into the lake beyond. The rest of the home is envisioned as a two-level box made of wood, steel, and glass for an overall feeling of lightness. The tightly spaced wood cladding fades into an open screen as the house stretches from the street out to the pool, opening up the views.

The home’s zero-maintenance roof is a single sheet of ventilated metal that collects rainwater in the technical room of the plinth. The home is insulated with washed sheep’s wool, and the floors are made of sustainably sourced pine wood. Local recycled materials were incorporated wherever possible.

“The incorporation of time in the architectural space, through a succession of vertical elements that accelerate the view towards the landscape, this relationship changes during the course of hours and days,” say the architects. “The harmony [and] color of the material represents an abstraction of the color of the surrounding nature [and proves that] in the end, environmental quality is what matters when it comes to living.”

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Hyuro made her mark in the form of massive murals that covered the facades of entire buildings, which appeared in places like Brazil, Italy, Belgium, England, and The Netherlands. She began her career in a more traditional medium, painting on canvas, but began to experiment with street art in 2010, when she first moved to Spain. Taking inspiration from artists she met there as well as the activist muralism movement in her native South America, Hyuro quickly developed an emotionally resonant style featuring feminine imagery not often seen large-scale in public places.

The mostly faceless women you see in each of her murals are sometimes variations of herself, and other times representative of issues facing women and girls in a broader sense. Whatever the meanings of her individual pieces may be, there’s definitely always more to her work than meets the eye. An empty dress on a hanger, painted ten stories high for the CURO festival in Brazil, speaks out against the criminalization of abortion there, which has led to the death of many women. In Spain, the frilly cuffs on a traditional judge’s robe make reference to a controversial court case in which five men were acquitted of gang-raping a teenager.

Others are more mysterious. One Werchter, Belgium mural called The Dance as an Act of Resistance features blindfolded girls in pale nightgowns. Older women wearing aprons and holding spoons stand silently in Italian alleyways or support the entire community on a floating tea towel. We often see feminine hands performing domestic but essential tasks, like repairing broken vases, preparing food, or nursing babies. The women here are both hidden and revealed, overlooked and over-exposed. The colors are soft, the gestures graceful. The clothing could place the subjects in either the present or the distant past.

“In the end, if you don’t show time or you don’t show faces, you give more space to the viewer to finish the piece in their own mind, within their own beliefs,” said Hyuro in a 2018 interview with Juxatpoz. “It doesn’t close off anything for the viewer, it doesn’t have to be this person. It keeps it open to interpretation. I just give my contribution to a place, and people can finish the meaning themselves.”

A tribute by her friend Evan Pricco in Juxtapoz Magazine sheds additional light on Hyuro’s life, work, and legacy. Here’s a brief excerpt:

“Many will speak of her legendary status in the street art and mural art communities, and indeed, she was. But this was a career not yet in full bloom. If you went to a festival over the past decade, Hyuro was often the only woman participating, and as representation started to evolve in recent years, that was probably because of her. She was an original, not only in the street art realm, but within the whole art community. A rebellious spirit, philosopher, social observer, mother, always bitingly funny, passionate, and curious, she was timeless as she looked to the future.”

Rest In Peace, Hyuro.

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At the Mercado Libre Office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a collaboration between architects and designers has produced some of the coolest tunnel-style stairs you’ve ever seen. BMA Arquitectos, Studio Elia Irastorza, and Methanoia came together to produce a working area for the company that would “boost and inspire talent and creativity,” embodying the booming Latin American e-commerce brand’s young, innovative, and distinctive style.

For the designers, that meant imagining stairs as a social space, and using them as a series of connections between floors that would allow employees to navigate the building “in a more unpredictable and personal way.” Key to the flow of the space is a principle of freedom of movement, offering users a choice of two or more different ways to move up or down within the building.

Multiple circular “tunnels” of stairs pierce each level at various points across the floor plan, each one lined entirely in medium-toned wood that contrasts with the starker, more industrial elements of the building.

The designers say they were aiming for a material palette that communicated comfort and warmth, not only from the wood, but also from living plants, lots of natural daylight streaming through massive glass windows, and oversized art pieces like sculptures and murals. They also identified multiple “areas of influence” where employees from different departments can congregate and socialize.

The architects add that the “multifunctional, fluid, and adaptable space was developed as an area that nurtures teamwork and leaves room for personal growth. It understands the office as a whole, instead of [dividing it into] separate floors, with the key instruments for integrating all of the different areas of the project [being] the ‘social stairs.’ These links are the protagonists, creating several connection points between each level. [From them,] a new type of communication arises, allowing the users to experience the office as one whole democratic space that encourages the exchange of ideas, and a dynamic workspace. Instead of [implementing] a traditional and static method of circulation, this new system embraces a non-linear movement. Since there are two links in each floor, one can walk around the nine office floors through a different path each time.”

“The core of the project resides on the sixth floor, where the stairs evolve into terraces that can even turn into a grand amphitheater. This space houses the main public area and the reception. Throughout the project, artistic interventions that fuse with the architecture through different materials and textures appear, creating a richer [sensory] experience. The other central concept introduced in the project was the use of vegetation in strategic points. Vertical divisions made of green walls and virtually enclosed spots allow certain areas of the plan to become more private and quiet for spontaneous meetings.”

The result takes what could have been an overwhelmingly large, cold, and impersonal office facility and injects it with friendliness and personality — two things a lot more workspaces could use in greater doses.

The post Step Into the Void: Tunneling Stairs at the Mercado Libre Office in Buenos Aires first appeared on Dornob.

For “A House Hidden in the Landscape,” architecture firm FRB Arquitectos took the seldom-trod middle path. Since the house’s hillside location isn’t too dramatically steep, its design was able to follow the natural topography with minimal intervention. A succession of inverted overhangs creates a multi-tiered space with plenty of room for outdoor recreation and enjoyment of the views overlooking Córdoba, Argentina.

The home starts at street level with a wide staircase set into a lawn, both of which technically form part of the roof. The staircase becomes almost like an amphitheater from which to take in the surrounding Sierras Chicas hills, dividing the social parts of the home from the private ones. Almost none of the actual house can be seen from the street. In fact, passersby could be forgiven for thinking it was part of a public park.

The architects explain that the house’s “walls emerge from the ground joined to the soil, with the roof being the protagonist. An exterior staircase acts as the main entrance and descends to a central courtyard that organizes the arrival to the interior. The pool, overlooking the horizon, is at the end of the access axis. The main volume is projected in the perpendicular direction, housing a fundamental part of the program including both housing and working spaces.”

“Another volume that functions as a study and barbecue area is located on the opposite side of the lot. Both volumes protect the courtyard from the wind, creating a particular microclimate while incorporating the exterior space into family life. The windows of the facade, with the possibility of being completely opened, allow a connection between the interior and the exterior through the courtyard, generating the concept of a gallery-house. A vehicular-level entry, comfortable enough in relation to the slope, blocks the south facade from the most intense rains.”

There’s a curious division in aesthetics between the two main volumes of the home, with one consisting of a lighter textured concrete facade and the other smoother, darker, and more rounded. This plays into the separation between work and play, social life and private life. It also picks up various shades and materials in the landscape itself, from the bright cloud-white of the pool to the sand, clay, and rock of the facade and stairs.

The most intriguing element of the home might just be its least flashy. Tucked around a corner, steps set into the grassy hill cascade down from a side door hidden among the trees, adding to the sense that the home’s interiors are teeming with things to be discovered. Whereas the living spaces are positioned for the best possible views of the surrounding hills, the stairway elements anchor the home in its own hillside setting.

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Minujin’s installation provides the perfect response to the Documenta 14 brief, which asked artists to explore the connection between its host cities, Kassel and Athens. Nonetheless, this isn’t the first time the Parthenon of Books has made a public appearance. The piece was first exhibited in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1983 — the same year the last dictatorship fell in Argentina. In a bold move, Minujin decided to open her Parthenon to the public just one week after democracy had been restored to the country. To make things even more poetic, the structure was eventually toppled over, allowing the public to reclaim the books they donated and, metaphorically speaking, take back the power of knowledge.

The original Parthenon in Athens was itself a victim of religious and political appropriation, undergoing countless changes at the behest of different regimes. Following these haphazard reconstructions, “the deconsecrated Parthenon of the modern period became a symbol of democracy and of Western cultural supremacy,” according to Documenta 14’s statement on the iconic temple. Reflecting on these events, it makes sense that Minujin would use the Parthenon as the vehicle through which to explore the contemporary idea of democracy and address the issue of censorship.

The installation is not only powerful in its ideology, but also in its form. The structure dominates the park and creates an interesting tension between lightness and heaviness, its massive size contrasting with its lightweight frame and the books themselves. The Parthenon of Books takes on an entirely different identity at night, when it’s illuminated from within and transformed into an almost pixelated version of itself.

Minujin has long been an advocate of self-empowerment through reading, explaining: “Democracy without books is not democracy. So nobody has the right to forbid books, because that is to forbid ideas. So, that’s how I work. I am always inventing new things, and I cannot stop my imagination. I cannot stop. It works immediately. Every day I have a new idea. And sometimes it takes me 18 years, like with the Babel Tower of Books, of trying to do it, trying to get the sponsor, because it was so high, and so big, and I got together books from all over the world. The people went up seven floors surrounded by books from all over the world.”

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Rising above the grassy landscape, this vacation home in the seaside Argentina town of Cariló features a rooftop swimming pool and expansive views of both an adjacent forest and the nearby ocean. Wanka House by Galera Studio is characterized by a floating box supported on one end by a narrow column, giving it a sense of weightlessness.

The ramp leading up to the house gives visitors an opportunity to appreciate their surroundings, which include a garden and a series of lower-level reflecting pools as well as the trees and the ocean breeze. The architects intended for this gradual introduction to the home to be an opportunity to leave the chaotic stress of leaving in big cities behind, starting their vacation before they even step through the front door.

The house is situated to the rear of the plot to place inhabitants closer to the beach, and provide some privacy from passersby on the street. In addition to the large, high-ceilinged modern concrete interior spaces, Wanka House includes a number of recreational spaces like terraced outdoor dining and barbecue areas.

Reaching the rooftop, guests are greeted by a large deck with a swimming pool and skylights that peer down into the living spaces. An elevated viewing platform provides views that extend far above the rooftops of nearby structures, bringing the sea closer to make this vacation spot feel like even more of an escape.

The post Cantilevered Vacation Home Takes in the Forest and Sea first appeared on Dornob.

There are certain objects which immediately bring to mind certain cities – for Buenos Aires, the wooden roller blinds on homes and businesses may just be those objects. They are simple but recognizable, ubiquitous and often discarded without a second thought.

Argentinian architects Maria Constanza Nuñez and Gabriel Pires Mateus, collectively known as Gruba, have created a line of recycled furniture from these wooden roller blinds that is uniquely Buenos Aires.

The salvaged bits and pieces are refinished to create sophisticated furniture that looks nothing like it was once discarded. The roller blind slats are joined together with simple wooden frames into chairs, loungers and coffee tables that are surprisingly elegant.

“The ‘SOS de barrio’ equipment line arises from the recovery of wooden roller blinds that are discarded in typical Buenos Aires neighborhoods. Working on the morphology, variables arise that propose different uses: support surface, single and double seats, footrest, etc. Each product is UNIQUE, depending on the curtain that is re-used.”

Veering away from the wooden slats but staying in line with their green vision, Gruba also created this amusing – and probably very comfortable – stool called Banquito Willy. It features an engineered wooden frame that is held together without nails or glue, and a seat of recycled tennis balls.

Aboout Gruba:

“The team is led by architects Constanza Nuñez and Gabriel Pires Mateus and functions as a dynamic structure made up of industrial architects and designers working alongside other design disciplines. Both combine their professional activity with academic activity at the University of Buenos Aires. We design ACTIONS for Public and Private Institutions with the aim of improving people’s quality of life through design as a tool for Innovation. Among which we can highlight MATERIAL ARGENTINO and FABRICA Diseño e Innovación for the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation of the Nation and DAR Design Argentino Responsible for the Ministry of Social Development of the Nation.”

The post Wooden Blinds Upcycled Into Gorgeous Furniture first appeared on Dornob.

When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar … or perhaps when it is shattered like glass. This piece is all the more surreal for being situated in a minimalist modern white room in what could well be the interior of a conventional contemporary house. Though artists might recognize this unusual frame job as artwork, this is doubtless not what carpenters mean when they refer to rough framing a wooden door.

Puns and plays on words aside (or perhaps inside), artist Leandro Elrich has quite an elegant way of shattering our expectations (so to speak) in works like this one, where the properties of one material are experimentally applied to a familiar object made from another substance. The last thing a viewer expects is for an almost boringly ordinary door to crack and crumble like a sheet of glass.

Knobs away! What appears to be a large door knob rests on the floor in front of the broken shards (still sitting loosely in their frame). Other works by Elrich likewise take typical settings, household furnishings and home fixtures like windows, ladders and curtains and add twists that turn these common situations and objects into visually and conceptually challenging works of art.

Erlich is represented by Sean Kelly New York. Of the artist and his work, they write:

“Leandro Erlich was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1973. An architect of the uncertain, Erlich creates spaces with fluid and unstable boundaries. Before one tries to make sense of his sculptures and installations, one senses the uncanny. A single change (up is down, inside is out) can be enough to upset the seemingly normal situation, collapsing and exposing our reality as counterfeit. Through this transgression of limits, the artist undermines certain absolutes and the institutions that reinforce them.”

“Leandro Erlich draws inspiration from his literary Argentinian forebear, Jorge Luis Borges, but references to the world of film also appear frequently in his work; Erlich makes no secret of his admiration for directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Luis Buñuel and David Lynch, whom, he argues, ‘have used the everyday as a stage for creating a fictional world obtained through the psychological subversion of everyday spaces.'”

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