PH Helguera transforms a former carpentry workshop within a Buenos Aires horizontal property into a 90 m² dwelling organized around a new longitudinal patio. The project reworks the section to bring daylight deep into the plot, employs a brick envelope that reframes the existing fabric, and integrates passive environmental strategies through an insulated double envelope, controlled openings, and planted substrates.
PH Helguera Technical Information
- Architecture Firm: OADD arquitectos
- Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Gross Area: 90 m2 | 969 Sq. Ft.
- Completion Year: 2023
- Photographs: © Bruto Studio
We treated the preexisting shell as a generator rather than an obstacle. The new patio and sectional shifts reorganize light, privacy, and domestic rituals around a calibrated void.
– Andrés Barone
PH Helguera Photographs
From Workshop to Patio House: Reframing the PH Typology
Buenos Aires’ PH typology often occupies long, narrow plots with shared party walls, where light and air rely on patios and voids. PH Helguera inherits the constraints of a former carpentry shop, including deep interiors and limited frontage. Rather than erasing the industrial past, the project reorganizes the section and sequence of spaces to align with domestic use. A new longitudinal patio becomes the regulating figure, replacing a chain of dark rooms with spaces that borrow light and air across the plan.
This intervention updates the local patio tradition by creating a precise void at its core. The patio serves as a spatial diaphragm, mediating between the street-facing opacity and the interior porosity. Preexistence is treated as a productive layer: original brickwork is not concealed but recast as the outer strata of a contemporary dwelling. The approach preserves the urban footprint while transforming the experiential quality of the interior, using subtraction and calibrated openings rather than wholesale reconstruction.
The Longitudinal Void as Organizer: Program, Section, and Social Life
Daily life aligns along a continuous sequence from living to kitchen to grill, each space directly accessing the patio. This linear arrangement avoids a singular “backyard” and instead produces an interior landscape of thresholds, where doors, benches, and plantings articulate micro-rooms without hard partitions. The patio reads as a collective room that extends interior routines outdoors, supporting informal dining and the social rituals associated with the parrilla while maintaining cross ventilation along the length of the lot.
Bedrooms sit on a raised plane at ground level, a measured shift that improves privacy above eye level from the social areas and captures higher daylight from clerestories and patio reflections. The split-level marks thresholds without closing off space, allowing diagonal views that keep the plan legible. Above, a large terrace provides a third outdoor layer. It relieves programmatic pressure from the compact footprint and introduces varied microclimates, from shaded niches beside the stairhead to exposed zones for drying, cultivation, or seasonal gathering.
Brick Tectonics and the “Coconut Paradigm”
The project’s envelope adopts a stereotomic logic rooted in the site’s original construction. Stacked masonry forms a robust, legible shell whose mass reads as a continuous fabric rather than a collage of additions. The exterior shows the grain and weight of brick, including reused units sourced from the site, which carry embedded traces of the previous workshop. This outer layer is paired with a thermally insulated double-envelope assembly that upgrades performance without diluting the material continuity of the street face and party walls.
Inside, surfaces shift to a smooth white finish that contrasts with the textured brick. The architects describe this as a “coconut paradigm”: a tough, tactile exterior and a refined, luminous interior. The contrast clarifies old and new layers, intensifies the perception of light across the patio, and supports visual calm for compact rooms. Junctions between the two registers are handled with crisp reveals and controlled thicknesses, making the building’s constructional logic legible rather than decorative.
Passive Systems and Urban Ecology
Orientation and calibrated apertures draw daylight into all zones while enabling cross ventilation along the longitudinal axis. The insulated sandwich wall stabilizes interior temperatures by dampening thermal swings, reducing dependence on mechanical conditioning. Openings are modulated to avoid glare, with deep reveals and the patio’s reflected light providing even illumination. At the scale of the section, the raised bedrooms and roof terrace promote stack effect, further supporting natural air movement.
Water and soil systems are folded into the architecture. Rainwater harvesting supplies irrigation for planters and green areas, while absorbent substrates slow runoff and improve on-site infiltration. A garden mesh screen supports climbing species that shade the patio, filter air, and host small-scale biodiversity, transforming limited ground into an internal ecosystem. By tightening the building footprint where possible and dedicating an area to permeable surfaces and planting, the project offsets the compact urban lot with productive landscape and measured environmental performance.
PH Helguera Plans
PH Helguera Image Gallery
About OADD arquitectos
OADD arquitectos is an architecture firm based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Founded in 2023 by Andrés Barone, Jorge Báez Moore, and Fabricio Contreras Ansbergs, the studio explores materiality, memory, and urban transformation through interventions that reinterpret existing conditions. Their approach prioritizes articulated spatial sequences, passive environmental strategies, and textured tectonics that integrate the past into sustainable contemporary living.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Architects: Arq. Andrés Barone, Arq. Jorge Báez Moore, Arq. Fabricio Contreras Ansbergs
- Structural engineers: Arq. Darío Márquez
- Construction company: JC Construcciones
