Jujuy Redux

An innovative high-rise apartment in Rosario adds formal plasticity to an urban corner

Jujuy Redux, a mid-rise residential building in Argentina, challenges well-worn scalar transformations of mid-rise housing typologies with a formally subtle and spatially complex mass. Operating simultaneously at the scale of the entire building volume as well as at that of each apartment, the building achieves a playful duality of detached envelope that functions within the units themselves.

Since Neoclassicism, the local code has functionally evolved so as to prevent any volumetric or ornamental projection beyond the construction line. Our answer to this challenge is to express and complicate the readability of horizontal strata by turning parapets into slabs and lintels into eaves, producing effects of diagonal torsion. The repetitive linear transition from mass to volume and from volume to surface creates a maximum visual and physical distortion with a minimum of formal interventions. As a result, the building appears dematerialized towards its corner, allowing the living rooms, the social space par excellence of each apartment, to fluidly relate to the pedestrian activity of the street below.

Intended to be mostly occupied by young couples and students, the project consists of 13 units of about 70 M2 and a duplex on the terrace, all with 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms each.