Clusellas Ades and Machado-Silvetti Slip a Corrugated Metal Foundation into an Industrial Block in La Boca

The Larivière Foundation began with a choice of site before any choice of form. Instead of a polished cultural district or a renovated mansion, the foundation took a lot on an industrial block in La Boca, the Buenos Aires port neighborhood known for its warehouses, tin-clad houses and working streets. The building is a collaboration between Clusellas Ades, led by Mariano Clusellas and Juan Ades, and Machado-Silvetti, led by Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti. It was completed in 2022 and covers 600 m².

What makes it worth your attention is the gap between the outside and the inside. From the street you see a modest gabled shed in corrugated metal, close to the vernacular of the block. Inside, you find a carefully built interior: white galleries, a freestanding oak volume that holds shelving and a library, and a stair pressed against board-marked concrete. The architects did not try to make the building stand out from La Boca. They placed a precise cultural interior inside a form the neighborhood already knows.

A Shed Among Brick Neighbors

The facade borrows the vocabulary of the street: a simple gable, ribbed metal cladding, and a single square window. Wedged between a red brick wall and plastered older buildings, it reads like a recent member of the block's warehouse family. The understatement is deliberate. A cultural institution in a working neighborhood can easily look like a foreign object, and this one avoids that.

The sliding corrugated panels add a second layer. With them open, the entrance meets the sidewalk directly. With them closed, the front becomes almost blank, a shuttered shed like its neighbors. The building can announce itself or withdraw, which suits a foundation that has to live alongside the daily rhythm of the block.

Threshold and Ramp

Entry runs up a concrete ramp with a steel handrail and into a recessed opening cut into the aluminum skin. The material changes at the door. Industrial metal outside gives way to oak inside, starting with a pivot door set into a wood-paneled wall and continuing in a corridor lined with shelving on both sides.

That corridor works as a decompression chamber. You walk between oak units, under concrete ceilings, toward a white room at the end. The sequence slows you down and shifts your attention from the street to the objects and books the building is designed to hold.

Galleries Under the Gable

The main hall is long, white and calm, with linear lights hung below a ribbed ceiling and a timber mezzanine closing the far end. The proportions come from the lot: narrow and deep, the standard shape of an urban parcel. The architects use that depth to make a gallery you take in through movement rather than in a single view.

Elsewhere a translucent gabled ceiling glows over an empty room with low partitions and exposed fabric ducts. Here the shed profile is visible from inside, softened into diffused light. The services stay exposed instead of hidden, an honest choice that fits the building's industrial origins.

An Oak Box Inside a Shed

The project's central idea is a piece of oak joinery scaled up to architecture. The mezzanine is a solid wooden volume, its faces lined with open bookshelves, that appears to float above the concrete floor of the hall. White trusses run overhead and a suspended light fixture hangs beside it. The box reads as furniture and as a room at the same time.

Look closely and the box does a lot of work. Vent slots are cut into the oak, a stair railing emerges from its side, and track lights are fixed to the concrete panels above. Storage, circulation and air handling are gathered into one crafted object, which leaves the surrounding gallery free and uncluttered. Concentrating the complexity in one element this way is the most useful lesson the building offers.

The Library Above

Upstairs the oak becomes a reading room. Shelves full of books line the walls, and tables carry printed photographs laid out for study. Beyond the shelving the white truss roof stays in view, so you never lose the sense of being inside the larger shed.

The empty shelving and low cabinets in some rooms are telling. The building leaves space for a collection to grow, and the joinery is built to receive it. Here the architecture is mostly a framework for an archive still being assembled.

Concrete, Oak and the Way Down

The stair is where the building's two main materials meet most directly. Board-marked concrete forms one side and an oak balustrade the other, with a bright library visible at the top. An angled concrete wall and oak railing frame views into a white gallery lit by a clerestory band, so the walk through the section becomes a series of framed glimpses.

The low-ceilinged white room, lit by thin strips of daylight across a pale stone floor, has a different mood from the tall hall. It is compressed and quiet, and it shows that the architects varied ceiling height and light on purpose within a tight 600 m² footprint.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan confirms how small the footprint is on its block: one narrow, deep parcel among larger neighbors. The ground floor gathers the service core, stair and lift at one end, leaving a gridded open hall at the other. The upper floor repeats that logic, with a central core and rows of desks across the open bay.

The sections show the main strategy clearly. A trussed gable sits over a mezzanine packed with shelving and ductwork, and a tall open hall runs alongside. The cross sections also show a glazed lower level, which explains the clerestory light reaching the lower rooms.

The long section traces the stair as it descends beside the mezzanine, while the street elevation reduces the whole project to a gabled house with one square window. Seen next to each other, the two drawings sum up the building: plain outside, carefully worked inside.

Why This Project Matters

Many cultural buildings arrive in a neighborhood as icons, often at the cost of the fabric around them. The Larivière Foundation takes the opposite approach. It accepts the shed, the corrugated metal and the narrow lot of an industrial block in La Boca, and puts its ambition into the interior. That is a credible model for institutions that want to sit within a neighborhood rather than above it.

It also shows what a small budget of square meters can hold when you treat joinery as architecture. The oak box combines storage, circulation, services and a library in one object, which leaves the rest of the building open and light. For anyone designing compact cultural spaces in dense, working parts of a city, this building is worth studying closely.

Larivière Foundation by Clusellas Ades (Mariano Clusellas, Juan Ades) and Machado-Silvetti (Rodolfo Machado, Jorge Silvetti). Location: La Boca, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Area: 600 m². Year: 2022. Photography: Javier Agustín Rojas.

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