DRM Arquitectura Extends a Suburban Buenos Aires Building in Timber to Create a Drive-Thru Ice Cream Shop

The drive-through is usually the least considered building on any suburban strip: a box, a window, a lane, a sign. In Remedios de Escalada, on the southern edge of greater Buenos Aires, DRM Arquitectura has taken that typology seriously. Veneciana Escalada expands an existing commercial building into a 510 m² ice cream shop where cars and people both arrive, circulate and stay. It was completed in 2024 under lead architects Luciano Dimaio, Nicolás Rocca and Esteban Muerza.

What interests us is the scale of the gesture. The team did not add a pickup window to the old building; they wrapped it. A timber post-and-beam frame and a long sloping roof sit over and around the existing concrete structure. The roof becomes the sign, and the frame works as both a porch and a dining hall. The result reads less like fast food and more like a public pavilion that happens to sell gelato, and that shift is the project's real argument.

A Corner That Works as a Billboard

From the street, the building is mostly roof. The wood-lined soffit tilts toward the corner, the glazed two-storey shopfront sits underneath, and a tall triangular sign marks the plot for drivers approaching at speed. This is roadside architecture in the honest sense: it has to register from a moving car before it registers as a building.

DRM resists the obvious move of oversized branding on a blank shed. The roof carries the identity through its silhouette and material. Seen through glass, the timber inside does the advertising that a backlit fascia would normally handle.

The Roof After Dark

Ice cream is an evening business in an Argentine summer, so the dusk views matter more than the daytime ones. Once the lights come on, the cantilevered roof reads as a warm lid over a glowing lantern. The upper floor glows behind its glazing, and the lit ground-floor dining room spills out toward the street.

In daylight the same corner is calmer. Exposed rafters and a timber slat screen filter the sun, and the building feels open rather than sealed, which suits a program built around brief, casual stops.

Timber Bolted onto Concrete

The joints tell the adaptive reuse story more clearly than any plan. Paired timber posts are braced with steel cables. Beams land on white steel plates. In one telling detail, a wooden post is bolted directly to a concrete beam, with a cable tray and a yellow service pipe running past painted brick.

We like that nothing here pretends to be seamless. The new frame is legibly a second layer attached to an older one, and its services stay visible. It is a frank way to extend a building on a commercial budget, and it gives the interior a workshop texture that suits the casual program.

Counters, Steel and Terrazzo

Inside, the material palette widens without losing discipline. The ice cream counter has a terrazzo front and sits below a wood slat menu wall. Elsewhere, corrugated galvanized steel clads counters and walls beside timber columns, with open shelving for glasses and jars under a plank ceiling.

The pairing of galvanized sheet and timber is a familiar vernacular in Argentina, from rural sheds to suburban workshops. Here it keeps the shop grounded and durable, a room built to take sticky hands and constant traffic.

A Dining Hall Under the Trusses

The interior shot of a child running across a red play mat, under timber trusses and a plant-filled shelving wall, captures the brief better than any diagram. This is a place where families are expected to linger. The drawings also show a tower with a water tank and a slide inside, which suggests the architects treated play as part of the program from the start.

Upstairs, the timber framing, glass balustrades and hanging cylindrical lamps create a quieter mezzanine. Its double-height relationship to the ground floor keeps the two levels in conversation, so the upper diners still feel connected to the counter below.

Edges, Terraces and Palms

The most generous moments happen at the edges. On a covered side terrace, existing palm trunks rise straight through the timber roof, with booth seating and dappled light on the tiled floor. Along the cafe frontage, a timber post-and-beam screen frames fixed benches and string lights, which softens the line between site and sidewalk.

Keeping the palms instead of clearing the lot is a small decision with large consequences. The trees give the building a landmark from inside and out, and they signal that the extension negotiated with the site rather than erasing it.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows a long, narrow building on a block between streets beside a wide avenue, which explains the drive-through logic. The ground and upper plans run on a steady column grid. Long counters and table groupings line the bar, and on the upper floor the stair, kitchen and bathrooms gather around a planted opening.

The roof plan and sections confirm how much work the roof does. Ribbed slopes carry two inset panels, and the cross sections cut through the existing structure, the water tank tower and the slide. The elevations make clear how the slatted upper facade and sloping roof dress an otherwise simple two-storey volume.

The summer and winter sun diagrams show the overhang shading the floor in hot months and admitting lower winter light, a sensible passive move for a glazed pavilion. The load diagram traces horizontal and vertical forces through the columns, and the construction sections connect the roof, the mezzanine diners and the ground-floor counter beside a parked car.

The axonometric joint details and the exploded frame drawing reveal a kit of columns, beams and joists that can be read and repeated. The closing ink wash sketch, a long pavilion with a deep overhang and slender posts, is perhaps the purest statement of intent: a roof, some posts and shade.

Why This Project Matters

Suburban commercial buildings are where most people actually meet architecture, and they rarely get a design team's full attention. Veneciana Escalada shows what happens when they do. An existing building is kept and extended in timber. Its structure is exposed, and the drive-through lane becomes part of a larger civic setting instead of a back-of-house funnel.

The broader lesson is about reuse without nostalgia. DRM Arquitectura does not restore the old building or hide it; it adds a legible new layer, bolted on and honest about its joints, and lets that layer carry the identity. For anyone working on retail strips, franchise sites or tired commercial stock, this is a useful precedent: the roof can be the sign, and a car-oriented program can still produce a room people want to stay in.

Veneciana Escalada Drive-Thru Ice Cream Shop by DRM Arquitectura (lead architects Luciano Dimaio, Nicolás Rocca and Esteban Muerza), Remedios de Escalada, Argentina. Area: 510 m². Year: 2024. Photography by Javier Agustín Rojas.

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