In the dense built fabric of the Villa del Parque district in Buenos Aires, OADD arquitectos has renovated an old, gloomy carpentry shop for residential use, reinterpreting the past as the seed from which the new springs, in a natural process where different languages are sedimenting.

If the original rooms, cramped and dark, were badly suited to accommodate a dwelling, the project focuses on the need to open up the space to the outside, flooding it with light and enhancing its fluid and airy character. On the ground floor, where the living room, kitchen and dining area are located, visually and usefully interconnected thanks to the absence of partitions, a large window opens the domestic environment out onto a longitudinal patio which acts as the fulcrum of relational life, and from which diffuse light filters.  On the upper floor, intimate and cosy, the bedrooms are located; a terrace acts as a catalytic element for outdoor activities.

The project declares a strong desire to reinterpret the historic space, according to an approach the designers call the “coconut paradigm”: just as the coconut has a double face (a tough, rough exterior and a soft, white interior), so PH Helguera preserves the exterior brickwork shell in bright hues, and reveals a diaphanous and luminous atmosphere on the inside, dematerialised by the white finishes of metal structures and plasterwork, and the smooth surfaces of the cement floors.

An approach that mixes history with contemporaneity and emphasises the dialectic of contrasts as the expressive code of the different temporal phases, avoiding any mimetic and rhetorical intention.