FRN / NOA House, Najmias Office for Architecture

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Description submitted by the project team. Casa FRN is located in front of the golf course of the Club Universidad de Buenos Aires in the CUBA gated community. The requirements for the project were very ambitious. The clients wanted a house with a tight surface area, no more than 350 m2, but they wanted a wide variety of spaces and for all of them to be spacious and generous in size. Finally we agreed on the architectural program: a master suite with dressing room, three en-suite bedrooms for the children, living room, dining room, kitchen, barbecue area, playroom, laundry room, a storage room and a utility room.

However, this was not all. Added to the multiplicity of desired spaces was the complexity of the relationships they desired between one environment and another. The challenge was not small: the master suite had to be away from the children’s rooms and, if possible, on another floor; Additionally, it had to be on the same floor as the living room or a few steps apart. Furthermore, the boys’ room had to be in relation to the barbecue area, but without being affected by any noise that might be present. And, also, they wanted the barbecue area to be close to the playroom and the kitchen. Finally, all the social environments of the house, as well as the suite, had to have open views of the golf.

After several iterations, which are a regular part of our design process, we were able to make these requirements compatible in a proposal that had a strong architectural synthesis and careful use of energy and natural resources, generating wide and long views without compromising the privacy of the inhabitants of the house. The FRN house is, in appearance, a simple project: two rectangles offset in plan. However, it proposes a complex architecture with a spatiality that transcends the obvious.

These two rectangles are very different from each other, one is a volume, closed, intimate and encloses the bedrooms; The other is open, extroverted, made up of two horizontal planes that contain the social area of ​​the house where the limits between interior and exterior are diluted: a reinforced concrete tray floats uninterrupted on the travertine plinth without any structure being perceived.

Given the extensive glass surface, special attention was paid to energy optimization: overhangs and eaves prevent sunlight in summer and allow its entry in winter; In addition, all the glass is treated to improve its performance and sunshades are used in the bedrooms. Care for the environment and sustainability is verified in the incorporation, in addition, of a gray water reuse system, solar collectors for hot water and solar panels for electricity generation.