Iñaki Harosteguy Turns a Sixteen-Square Grid into an Open-Ended Home Near La Plata

A few meters from Parque Pereyra on the fringe of La Plata, a grid of precast concrete columns rises from a flat suburban lot in Villa Elisa, Argentina. Iñaki Harosteguy designed the 210 square meter House with Columns as a kind of inhabited Sol LeWitt sculpture: sixteen squares of equal dimension, each spanning 3.5 meters, locked into a post-and-beam framework that refuses to privilege one room over another. Completed in 2022, the house treats its own structure as both the primary ornament and the organizing principle of everyday life.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is its refusal to finish. The structural matrix is permanent, precast and bolted into place, but the walls and skins that fill it are explicitly temporary. Curtains, translucent panels, glass block enclosures, and open air share the same grid bays on equal terms. The result is not indeterminacy for its own sake but a real argument: that a sufficiently rigorous skeleton can absorb any domestic program without losing coherence. The house is less a floor plan than a set of rules, and the inhabitants are the ones who decide what each square becomes.

The Concrete Matrix

The equidistant columns and simply supported beams create what Harosteguy calls a hypostyle hall, a term borrowed from ancient Egyptian temple architecture but deployed here without grandeur or ceremony. Every column is the same diameter, every beam the same section. There is no hierarchy between the bay that holds the dining table and the one that opens directly onto the garden. The precast elements arrived on site as a kit of identical parts, a decision that kept construction costs predictable and gave the whole assembly an almost industrial repetition.

Walk through the interior and the rhythm is constant: column, gap, column, gap. Ceiling beams cast parallel shadows across the slab, reinforcing the sense that you are moving through a spatial score rather than a sequence of rooms. The raw concrete is left unfinished, its surface registering the formwork grain in a way that gives the columns texture without requiring any applied finish.

Filters Instead of Walls

Rather than enclosing each bay with masonry or drywall, Harosteguy layers a series of translucent and semi-transparent skins across the grid. Translucent roof panels turn the covered terraces into luminous outdoor rooms, casting a soft checkerboard of shadow across the paving below. Sheer curtains billow between columns in the living area, admitting daylight while diffusing views. These filters are accumulative: stack enough of them and you get privacy; peel them back and the house becomes a pavilion.

The climatic implications matter. Villa Elisa is humid and warm for much of the year, and the patios shaped within the grid manage airflow through the interior without mechanical systems. By treating enclosure as a spectrum rather than a binary, the house can open wide in summer and contract around a smaller volume in winter. Inhabitants rearrange these temporary skins as conditions change, which means the house never settles into a single spatial diagram.

The Cylindrical Bathroom

The bathroom is the one element that breaks the grid's isotropic calm. Positioned adjacent to the main volume rather than inside it, this cylindrical enclosure is wrapped in glass block, a glass-concrete envelope that lets light flood the interior while keeping the occupant screened from view. A curved terrazzo countertop follows the wall's arc, turning what is usually the most utilitarian room in a house into a sculptural object in its own right.

Placing the bathroom outside the grid is a smart move. It frees up a full bay for living space and signals that the sixteen-square matrix is not a cage. Exceptions can exist alongside the rule, provided they acknowledge the framework they are departing from. The cylinder reads as a satellite, a smaller planet orbiting the main structure, and its material language of glass block contrasts cleanly with the raw concrete of the columns.

Landscape as Co-Author

Seen from the rear at twilight, the house registers as a lit vitrine set into a green lawn, with the swimming pool reflecting the concrete frame back at itself. The glazed facade on this elevation is almost entirely transparent, collapsing the distinction between garden terrace and dining room into a single continuous surface. Potted plants migrate between interior bays and the terrace, further eroding the line between built and planted space.

Harosteguy has spoken about investigating the relationship between house and landscape through patio configuration, and the project delivers on that ambition. The covered patios are not leftover space but deliberately shaped voids that pull greenery, light, and breeze into the heart of the plan. The proximity to Parque Pereyra, one of the region's largest ecological reserves, makes this porosity feel earned rather than decorative. Nature is not a backdrop here; it is a participant.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan reveals the rectangular footprint centered on its lot, with a perimeter belt of trees softening the boundary between the property and its neighbors. The grid reads clearly: four bays by four bays, with some squares roofed and others left open to the sky. Landscape elements, the pool, paths, and planted zones, are arranged around the building with the same deliberate spacing, as if the 3.5-meter module extends outward into the ground plane.

Why This Project Matters

House with Columns arrives at a moment when residential architecture is increasingly fixated on bespoke detailing and hyper-specific programs. Harosteguy pushes in the opposite direction: maximum structure, minimum prescription. The precast grid is indifferent to whether a bay holds a bedroom, a kitchen, or nothing at all. That indifference is liberating. It recalls the Archizoom "No-Stop City" idea that architecture's highest ambition might be to create a framework so neutral that life itself becomes the decoration.

What keeps the project from tipping into academic abstraction is its material honesty and its responsiveness to climate. The translucent panels, sheer curtains, and glass block bathroom are not theoretical propositions; they are practical filters calibrated to the humidity and heat of the Buenos Aires hinterland. The house proves that a conceptually rigorous grid and a comfortable domestic environment are not mutually exclusive. Rules, it turns out, can be generous.

House with Columns, designed by Iñaki Harosteguy, Villa Elisa, Argentina. 210 m², completed 2022. Photography by Javier Agustín Rojas.

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