Architects: González Olsina & Vega Arquitectos
Area: 750 m²
Year: 2023
Photographs: Luis Abba
Suppliers: Arquimetal, Aspen Lumiere, FV, Grupo Forestal, Hipercerámico, Hiperpiedras, Materiales Gaudí, Mendoglass, Puromármol
Category: Casas
Lead Architects: Charly González Olsina, Eduardo Vega
Site Manager: Cecilia Blanco, Nicolás Telechea
Project Director: Bianca Brescia
Landscape Architecture: Eduardo Vera
Interior Design: Consuelo Delgado
Project Management: Integra CPM
Construction: Integra CPM
City: Los Chacayes
Country: Argentina
Description provided by the project team. The site is a six-acre vineyard within The Vines of Mendoza, in Los Chacayes, Tunuyán, 85 kilometers southwest of the city of Mendoza, Argentina. It is located at the foothills of the Andes mountain range, in the renowned Uco Valley, one of the most prestigious wine-producing regions in the country.
In a landscape of open horizons and profound Andean silence, Scott, the client—passionate about wine and its culture—decided to acquire his own vineyard, produce his wines, and build a house where he could share moments of rest, nature, and contemplation with his loved ones.
The program consisted of a non-urban dwelling conceived as a retreat in a direct relationship with the vineyards and the mountain range. It includes a common space for living, dining, and cooking, four bedrooms, a workspace, a wine cellar, and outdoor leisure areas.
The guiding concept was based on an interpretation of the territory as a horizontal and silent geometry, where the architecture aligns with the existing natural order, the cosmos. Conceived as an inhabited line, arranged parallel to the mountain range, it organizes the functions and orients each space toward the Andean horizon. Its transversal layout responds to a will for belonging: that every realm of dwelling participates in the same act of contemplation.
The design strategy thus arises from three principles. Horizontality as a form of integration, understood both as a compositional gesture and as an attitude toward the landscape; through a linear circulation to the east, the functions are articulated and arranged toward the Andean west. The platform as boundary and mediation, a plane that elevates the gaze above the vineyards, connecting it with the mountains and providing a precise distance from the ground. Matter as continuity with the surroundings, where local stone and pigmented concrete are expressions of the same mineral nature. Mass, texture, and tone merge into a material continuity with the mountain range. The concrete, with its serene and mineral presence, provides weight and timelessness. The stone, in its irregularity and density, anchors the work to the site.
Together, these principles shape an architecture that seeks to endure without imposing itself, to integrate without dissolving. A quiet, tectonic presence that emerges from the territory as an extension of its own structure. The overall composition responds to a criterion of synthesis: a geometric language, proportions that follow the ancient notion of number as a principle of beauty, and a balance between opacity and transparency.
To inhabit this house is to enter a different rhythm, one that invites stillness, where time becomes matter and silence gains density. Each space awakens an awareness of the present moment. Its austere geometry, stripped of artifice, is charged with meaning as it serves the essential. It offers itself as a link between human beings and nature, where dwelling becomes an act of contemplation. More than a house, it is a pause in the landscape: a silent presence that finds its reason for being in the immensity that surrounds it.
Curated by Valentina Díaz