Felipe Gonzalez Arzac Floats a Timber Box over Glass Walls in a Buenos Aires Suburb

There is a particular kind of discipline that shows up when an architect limits a residential project to three materials and refuses to blink. Casa IT, designed by Felipe Gonzalez Arzac with lead architect Rosario Gonzalez Arzac, sits in the leafy suburb of City Bell on the outskirts of La Plata, Argentina. The house is 260 square meters of concrete, glass, and wood, each material deployed not for decorative texture but for structural and spatial purpose. Board-formed concrete anchors the house to the ground. Glass dissolves the boundary between interior and landscape. Timber wraps the upper volume in a warm, opaque skin that cantilevers over the transparent ground floor.

What makes Casa IT worth studying is not its material palette alone but the way the architects use it to stage a contradiction: heaviness floating above lightness, opacity resting on transparency. The ground floor reads as open landscape, threaded with planted courtyards and glass corridors. The upper level reads as a closed, private box, sheathed in vertical timber slats that filter light and shield the occupants from the street. The result is a house that shifts its character entirely depending on whether you are looking at it from outside or living inside it.

A Facade That Operates in Layers

From the street, Casa IT presents itself as a stacked composition. A low board-formed concrete plinth, rough and mineral, sits below a generous band of glass that reveals the depth of the ground floor. Above, the timber-clad volume projects forward, cantilevering past the glazed plane and casting a shadow line that defines the entry. The vertical slats of the upper cladding introduce rhythm and scale, their spacing narrow enough to read as a continuous surface at a distance but open enough to admit filtered light up close.

The lawn in front is deliberately simple, almost suburban in its normality, which makes the architectural precision of the facade feel all the more deliberate. Nothing competes for attention. The house asserts its geometry against the sky and lets the material contrast do the talking.

The Cantilever as Spatial Strategy

The cantilever at Casa IT is more than a structural gesture. By pushing the timber volume past the glass walls below, the architects create a covered terrace at ground level that mediates between inside and outside. The concrete soffit of the overhang provides shade and a sense of enclosure without enclosing. You stand underneath it and the house surrounds you on three sides, but the fourth opens to the garden and the sky.

This move also protects the glazed ground floor from direct sun and rain, functioning as a passive environmental strategy. The upper volume acts as a brise-soleil for the lower one, shading the living spaces below while its own timber screen controls solar gain independently. It is a neat piece of sectional logic: each floor protects the one beneath it.

Glass Corridors and Planted Courtyards

The ground floor plan is organized around a series of courtyards that pull landscape deep into the body of the house. Glass-walled corridors run alongside these planted voids, so that movement through the house always involves visual contact with greenery, soil, and sky. Exposed concrete columns stand between the glazed panels, marking the structural grid without obstructing the view.

The courtyards are not incidental. They bring light into the center of the plan, ventilate the interior, and create a sense of spatial generosity that the 260-square-meter footprint might not otherwise allow. Every room looks out onto something growing, which softens the concrete and glass palette considerably. The planting is restrained: grasses, low shrubs, a few trees. Nothing tropical, nothing fussy.

Timber as Interior Atmosphere

Inside, the timber cladding that wraps the upper volume extends into the rooms themselves, covering walls and ceilings in a continuous warm surface. The effect is intimate, almost cabin-like, a sharp contrast to the glass-and-concrete openness of the ground floor. Translucent sliding screens and slatted partitions modulate light within these upper rooms, casting linear shadow patterns across floors and walls that shift with the time of day.

One room, stripped to a single chair facing a translucent glazed wall, reads like a meditation on filtered light itself. The diagonal shadows crossing the floor mark the hour as precisely as a sundial. The architects clearly understand that timber, when deployed with restraint, does not need decoration. The grain, the joinery, and the play of light are enough.

Kitchen and Living as Landscape Events

The kitchen sits beneath a board-formed concrete ceiling and looks directly through a glazed wall into a planted courtyard. Timber cabinetry echoes the material language of the upper volume, tying the house together across its two floors. A dining table in adjacent space sits between two glass walls, flanked by courtyard planting on both sides. Meals happen inside the garden, not merely next to it.

Sliding glass panels along the southern facade open the dining and living areas entirely to the lawn, collapsing the threshold between interior and exterior. At dusk, the house glows from within, the sheer curtains behind the glass softening the interior light into a warm haze. The architecture becomes a lantern, signaling domestic life to the quiet suburban street.

The Staircase and Threshold Moments

A glass-enclosed staircase with steel treads and a central spine connects the two floors, positioned to overlook one of the planted courtyards. The stair is exposed, performative even, but not gratuitously so. It marks the transition from the transparent public world of the ground floor to the enclosed private realm above. A narrow hallway nearby, lined in timber paneling, is lit by a clerestory window that drops a blade of light onto a potted plant. Small gestures like this reveal an architect paying attention to the experience of walking through a house, not just the experience of looking at one.

Dusk and the Reading of Opacity

At dusk, Casa IT inverts its daytime logic. The timber-clad upper volume, which reads as opaque and closed during the day, becomes translucent as interior lights push through the slats. Hinged window panels within the timber screen open to reveal illuminated rooms, puncturing the facade's uniformity. Below, the glass walls of the ground floor glow with warm light filtered through sheer curtains, making the entire lower level a horizontal bar of diffused brightness.

This duality is one of the house's strongest qualities. It is not the same building at noon and at night. The material choices, which seem minimalist by day, turn out to be calibrated for the full 24-hour cycle of inhabitation.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plans reveal the courtyard strategy clearly: planted voids punctuate the rectangular footprint at regular intervals, organizing circulation and introducing light to the center of the plan. The upper level sits within the timber-clad envelope, smaller than the ground floor, its reduced footprint generating the cantilever. A pool and stepped terrace occupy the rear of the lot, visible in the section drawing as a terraced landscape that descends from the main living level.

The elevation drawings confirm the proportional discipline of the facade: the glazed ground level occupies roughly one-third of the total height, the timber upper volume two-thirds. The rear elevation is more perforated, with openings punched into what appears to be concrete or rendered wall, acknowledging that the back of the house faces private garden rather than public street.

Why This Project Matters

Casa IT matters because it demonstrates that material restraint, when paired with spatial intelligence, produces architecture that is richer than the sum of its components. Three materials. Two floors. A series of courtyards. That is the entire toolkit. The discipline extends to the landscape, the furniture placement, the way light is admitted and directed. Nothing is extraneous. In a residential market saturated with houses that confuse complexity with quality, this is a corrective.

The house also offers a model for suburban living that refuses to treat the suburb as an afterthought. City Bell is not a dense urban center, and Casa IT does not pretend otherwise. It engages its lawn, its neighbors, its sky. But it does so with an architectural seriousness that elevates the ordinary condition of the suburban lot into something worth paying attention to. That, in the end, is the argument the house makes: that the most common brief, a family home on a flat piece of land, deserves the most rigorous thinking.

Casa IT by Felipe Gonzalez Arzac, lead architect Rosario Gonzalez Arzac. City Bell, Argentina. 260 m². Completed 2021. Photography by Javier Agustín Rojas.

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