MedinaMas/Arq Embeds a Concrete and Timber Residence into Argentina's Foothills

A house that looks single-storey from the street and reveals a full second level at the back is not a new trick, but MedinaMas/Arq's House Victoria in San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina, does it with uncommon precision. Lead architects Gabriela Medina and Martin Mas have taken a steeply sloping plot in La Almona, a foothills neighborhood on the city's outskirts, and carved a 150 m² home into the terrain so that its social spaces sit at street grade while its private rooms are buried in the slope below.

What makes the project worth studying is not the split-level trick itself but the material and spatial economy with which it is executed. Three materials do nearly all the work: board-formed concrete, vertical timber cladding, and full-height glass. There is almost nothing else. The restraint allows the landscape, a barren mountain range visible from practically every room, to become the dominant finish. The house is a frame, and the architects had the discipline to keep it that way.

Playing the Slope

From the approach, House Victoria reads as a low, horizontal bar. A board-formed concrete wall, a timber-clad volume, and a single gnarled tree are all you register. Walk around to the rear and a second storey appears, cantilevered over the hillside on concrete piers. The aerial view at dusk makes the strategy legible: the house is a narrow rectangle dropped lengthwise along the contour, minimizing the cut into the terrain.

Embedding the lower level into the earth is a straightforward move toward thermal stability. The surrounding soil acts as insulation, keeping bedroom temperatures moderate through Jujuy's dry, fluctuating climate without heavy mechanical intervention. It also concentrates the building's visual mass at the uphill side, so from below the house appears to float rather than loom.

Concrete, Timber, and Nothing Else

The material palette is almost aggressively limited. Board-formed concrete handles all structural and retaining duties: walls, ceilings, the cantilevered slab. The formwork grain is left exposed, rough enough to read as geological rather than industrial. Against this, vertical timber slats wrap the non-structural enclosures, their warm tone softening what would otherwise be a bunker.

A small chrome drinking fountain recessed into one of the concrete walls, flanked by timber paneling, captures the house's attitude toward detail. There is nothing decorative. Every element is either structural, environmental, or functional, and the visual pleasure comes from the honesty of that arrangement. Even the black metal chimney stack rising past the glazed facade reads as a necessary object rather than an ornament.

Framing the View

Full-height glazing dominates the downhill facades. Corner glass panels at the lower level eliminate the column at the building's edge, creating an uninterrupted panorama of the foothills. Vertical timber louvres on the upper level filter light and offer privacy without closing off the view entirely. The interplay between open glass and slatted timber gives the house two registers of transparency: wide and screened.

The louvres do more than manage sunlight. They cast long, angular shadows across the concrete terrace, marking the passage of the day on the floor in a way that turns the house into a slow-motion sundial. It is a familiar passive design device, but MedinaMas/Arq have calibrated the spacing tightly enough that the effect feels intentional rather than incidental.

Living on the Upper Level

The ground floor, which is the upper level relative to the slope, contains the social program: living room, dining room, kitchen, a guest bedroom, and a bathroom. These spaces open directly onto a covered gallery through sliding glass doors. From the terrace you look straight through the kitchen to the hills beyond, collapsing the distance between cooking and landscape in a single sightline.

The entry sequence is deliberately compressed. A recessed porch framed by a vertical timber screen and one of the site's existing trees funnels you into the house through a relatively low, shaded threshold before the space expands into the open living area. The contrast between the tight entry and the expansive interior is the house's primary spatial event on this level.

Retreat Below Grade

The lower level steps down into the hillside and houses the private rooms: two bedrooms flanking a central bathroom with a freestanding tub, plus a dedicated desk area. Because this level is partially earth-sheltered, it stays cooler and quieter than the social floor above. The glazed rear facade opens these rooms to the view, preventing them from feeling like a basement despite their embedded position.

The site plan reveals how compact the building footprint actually is relative to the plot. The house occupies a narrow band, leaving the majority of the lot as scrubland with its existing trees intact. Rather than terracing the entire slope, the architects concentrated the intervention and let the landscape recover around it.

Plans and Drawings

The sections are the most revealing documents. They show the house stepping down on concrete piers, with the upper slab cantilevering past the lower volume to create the covered terrace. Structural columns march along the downhill edge, carrying the load that the absent hillside can no longer provide. The front elevation confirms the low horizontal read from the street: a chimney, a recessed glazed entry, and almost no visible mass above grade.

The ground and upper floor plans illustrate a clear programmatic split. Open-plan living wraps around the gallery on one level; enclosed, private rooms are organized symmetrically around a shared bathroom on the other. There is nothing ambiguous about the hierarchy, and the staircase linking the two levels sits at the center of the plan, acting as the hinge between public and private life.

Why This Project Matters

House Victoria works because it solves several problems with a single move. Embedding the lower floor into the slope handles thermal performance, visual scale, and programmatic separation all at once. The material restraint, just concrete, timber, and glass, reinforces that economy of means. In a residential market saturated with hillside homes that fight their terrain with retaining walls and imported fill, this house cooperates with the ground it sits on.

For a practice working in the northwest Argentine foothills, MedinaMas/Arq demonstrate that site-responsive design does not require exotic technologies or inflated budgets. It requires a clear reading of topography, honest materials, and the willingness to let the landscape do the heavy lifting. At 150 square meters, House Victoria is compact enough that every decision is visible, and not one of them feels wasted.

House Victoria by MedinaMas/Arq (lead architects Gabriela Medina and Martin Mas), La Almona, San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina. 150 m². Completed 2021. Structural calculation by Ing. Hector Caceres.

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