Edificio del Plata

corresponds to offices: more than 600 office plots per square kilometre. Housing, meanwhile, accounts for 20%, with fewer than 200 residential plots per square kilometre…"

2020, pandemic, City of Buenos Aires. The city emptied of traffic and people. Its services closed, an internal migration towards the periphery. Microcentro suffered, as never before, the most serious abandonment since its beginnings as the city's financial district. As a result, the following years brought policies to reorganise land use through financing and new tax rules.

The population voids across the commercial and executive uses of the Microcentro blocks reveal a new demographic, which we used as the conceptual trigger for our proposal. This record of solids and voids is a device that lets us organise a compositional grid through a system of repeatable cells, applicable across several areas of intervention at different scales, materials and textures.

This cellular composition creates a map of textures that organises the flooring, the planting and the furniture, on both the roof terrace and the ground floor. It also works as a morphological piece that folds and allows a fractal play

and, depending on how it is applied, gives shape to the various pieces that define the building's interior design. All of which, through its configuration, gives us a kind of texture map applicable to every area of intervention. Inside the studio flat the system appears again, materialised in a piece that works as a divider and a support for different uses, under the same formal premise.

In tectonic terms the material strategy sets out to partially dress the existing building while leaving the original visible. The project has an industrial character, with sand tones, greys, and certain highlights and glints focused in areas where a degree of sophistication stands out. The way the ceilings are applied lets the existing slab and its services show through the gaps, as part of a group of textures where the existing fabric and the contemporary intervention meet. The applied stone interventions speak to the existing concrete columns, whose rough bush-hammered treatment underlines that this is a container with a long history.

The ground floor is functionally integrated between the lobby and the shops through two large entrance portals, and visually integrated between the Pasaje Carabelas square and the Carlos Pellegrini pavement through a compositional system applied to the flooring and an artistic lighting ceiling running across the building. We added a reception space that resolves both entrances.

Given the building's multiple uses, the proposal addresses signage and environmental graphics as part of the holistic design of the scheme.

(grasses, salvias, lavenders and herbaceous plants) are organised within the cellular compositional system, as are its shallow-rooted trees (Aguaribay, Anacahuita, Bauhinia, Acer palmatum, citrus). The suspended artistic lighting object that acts as a ceiling also follows the same composition and fractal logic.

Besides conveying an industrial aesthetic, the chosen materials meet certain sustainability requirements: the suspended acoustic felt ceiling (made of 100% recyclable components), sprayed cellulose applied to the slab, the screen panel, and Geoclad SW 1520 sheet, among others.

We understand that an interior design proposal must meet not only compositional balance but conceptual coherence, where a criterion of "holistic design" allows the whole set of elements to be grasped as one.