O'Neil Ford Duograph 3: Argentina

Altamira Building, 1998-2001, by Rafael Iglesia. Florencia Raigal House, 2005-2006, by Marcelo Villafañe. Edited and with a Foreword by Wilfried Wang. With essays by Federico Pastorino, Wilfried Wang, Juan Manuel Rois, Rafael Iglesia and Marcelo Villafañe.

This volume presents a high-rise and a free-standing house, two common building types of contemporary architecture. These buildings are located in Rosario, Argentina’s third largest city, a city with a dense aggregation of high-rises in the downtown area, surrounded by the conventional suburban belt, which is now spreading deep into the Pampas. The specific resolution of the two buildings is anything but typical. This Duograph offers close examinations, revealing the two buildings to be radical reinterpretations of their types. Marcelo Villafañe’s small house for Florencia Raigal integrates a spatial specificity - in continuation of the modernist free plan - with a "parlante" configuration: a house that comes to life with a distinct sculptural roof that happens to be hipped, but actually originates in the three dimensional reanimation of an abstracted cow-hide, so typical and at the same time so distinctive of Argentina, a country of "gauchos, asados & quinchos" (cowboys, barbecues and grill pavillons). With orthodox modernism’s stricture on the use of pitched roofs and the subsequent loss of knowledge regarding the plastic-sculptural potential of a building, or more generally modernism’s fear of the figurative, few architects have tried to re-enter this domain of a configured architecture. In this small house Villafañe shows in a wordless but built manifesto all his design control. Belying the house’s casualness there is a compositional rigor which clearly surfaces upon close reading. 144 Seiten mit 190 Farbabb., Querformat 29 x 21,5 cm, broschiert (O'NFD_3 - The O'Neil Ford Duograph Series; Vol. 3/The Centre for American Architecture and Design & the O'Neil Ford Chair in Architecture, University of Texas at Austin/Wasmuth Verlag 2011)