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Amancio William Williamss THE HOUSE OVER THE BROOK, MAR DEL PLATA We publish this extraordinary work of architecture, designed in 1943 by the Argentinian master for his musician father. The great protagonist of the South American modern modern movement movement managed managed with this building building to express spatial, technical and formal quality, making it certainly one of the most significant achievements of its time Text Daniel Tiozzo
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“The true architect considers the degenerate period in which art consisted in the imitation of earlier works to be a thing of the past. Here instead begins the period in which the new has to be created, where creation can count on magnificent means of selfexpression.” This is how Amancio Williams defined the meaning of his profession and the leitmotiv of his projects. Throughout a long career, which won him numerous honours, Williams (who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1913 and died there in 1989) undertook the design of numerous projects, but built only a few. His most important built work is the House over the Brook, designed for his composer father. It includes a small service pavilion nearby to accommodate household servants. Both buildings, situated in a park and not far apart, were designed in 1943. So one might reasonably have expected them to be compositionally and figuratively similar. Instead, the two designs differ enormously. Close examination reveals the richness of their composition, a quality that distinguishes all of Williams’ architecture. His approach belongs to a rare and unusual sphere of architectural design, founded on continual contrasts and an antithetical logic Pages 70-71: the House over the Brook. This page, top: in the ground plan of the site inside Pereyra Iraola Park can be noted, left, the House over the Brook and its annexes, and right, the House in the Park, designed in the same period by Williams Williams for his brother but never
built; below: the service pavilion’s inner court has a centrally positioned washtub. In line with Le Corbusier’s impressions of the Charterhouse of Ema, the courtyard is a meditative space, with the washtub representing the well
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that gave rise to surprising and absolutely unique achievements. Is it not a contradiction and at the same time a remarkable solution, to locate a house – the epitome of stability – above the perpetual movement of a stream? The House over the Brook complex was built on a prime site, in the middle of the Pereyra Iraola Park, in Mar del Plata. A glance at the ground plan sh ows the humility with which Williams approaches his context. He seeks and finds a spot on which his building will cause the least possible disturbance to the dense vegetation that will host it. Thus the house is built over the stream, which becomes an integral part of the design by generating fresh dynamics on a site no longer cut in two. The pure forms of the construction reject any attempt to simply blend into the natural landscape, yet maintain a close dialogue with the surroundings. Suffice to note the house’s attachment to the ground. The distancing from nature to reach the man-made construction is gradual, achieved by using materials that require an increasingly sophisticated level of processing. This graduality accompanies and introduces us inside the house. That said, the uniqueness of this home resides in the bridge structure that makes it straddle the stream, thus uniting the two halves of the site while accommodating the building at the same time. Williams designed an innovative frame in reinforced concrete, with a slender arch and thin vertical partitions to support the floor slab and parapet. In this case, the slab and the arch work together structurally. Moreover, the parapet becomes an active part of the structure, influenced by different projects designed for bridges by Robert Maillart in the 1930s. It also helps to emphasise the plasticity of the volumes All drawings and photos © Amancio Williams Archive
This page, from top: view, elevation and plan of the service pavilion near near the House over the Brook. The elevation shows the emphasis Williams placed on the two vaults forming the roof over the bedrooms, and his firm
intention to prevent the annexe from presiding over the park by minimising the number of eye-level windows. The plan clarifies the courtyard’s role as a connective and typal element
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The House on the Brook in Mar del Plata (Argentina) was designed by Amancio Williams in 1943, in collaboration with Delfina Gálvez de Williams, and built between 1943 and 1945. Today unfortunately the work is in
a woeful state of disrepair and totally abandoned. Most of Williams’ work documents are preserved in the Amancio Williams Archive, Buenos Aires, managed by his son Claudio. www.amanciowilliams.com
Opposite page: entrance Photo centre: the bridge area of the House over structure brings structure brings out the the the Brook. For a refined sculptural sculp tural char character acter of look, Williams mixed the the reinforced concrete. concrete for the walls with Supported by vertical local pebbles, furthering the partitions, the flat slab aesthetic relationship with floor of the house sits on the natural surroundings. the tangent of the curved This page, from top element, giving static and right: plans of the roof, formal distinction to the first floor and entry level two parts
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and the lightness of the project as a whole, despite the use of bare concrete. Williams, who analysed concrete both chemically and by hammer tests, loved the material for being able to express his free-standing forms. They are pure forms that he did not hesitate to enrich with relevant details in plain sight, yet in no way did they prevent the house from being perceived in its entirety as a pure volume. The detail is not decoration, but rather the demonstration of perfect and innovative technique. The interior of the house responds to the same logic. Its furniture and finishes are carefully conceived, but deliberately designed to not outshine the master plan. The bridgestructure is developed symmetrically to the axis of the stream, whereas the plan of the house is developed in the opposite direction. The elementary plan is none other than a typological reinterpretation of the so-called chorizo house, deeply rooted in the history and culture of the pampas. Here again, antithetical elements contrast with one another: advanced technology in the choice of structure, and tradition in the local type of house adopted. If a Pompeiian house consists of a central patio with rooms opening off it, the chorizo alters that typology by means of a simple division line over the centre. Thus a tripartite plan is obtained: a row of bedrooms, a connecting gallery and an open space (the patio). This same tripartition is clearly present in the House over the Brook. By breaking down the plan, which rests on the bridge structure, it is easy to observe that the row of rooms lies on one side, and on the other we find a completely unified space that projects outward, accompanied by a ribbon window all along the perimeter, which interprets the patio idea. In the middle, acting as a gallery, are the stairs and the corridor to the bedrooms. It is interesting to note how Williams handles the roof slab by adopting a construction technique that was unusual for the time. The reinforced-concrete slab has a raised edge, inside which rests a floating pavement that sits on small masonry piers. On top of it, he positioned “objects” – from the skylights to the water tank – in a composition that seems to bear comparison with the purist painting of Le Corbusier, all the while perfectly responding to the strictest technical and functional necessities. Affinities betwee n the Swiss m aster and Williams are also noticeable in the service pavilion. This small outbuilding is a concentration of all sorts of information that helps us to understand and appreciate the Argentinian architect’s compositional thinking. The pavilion stands next to the entrance to the property. In fact, after entering through a two-winged gate designed personally by Williams and reminiscent of those used in farms scattered across the pampas, we immediately see the part occupied by the garage on the right. From here, a pathway,
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Above: cross Above: cross-sectio section n of the living quarters. Below: cross-section of the ground-level attachment
Williams made hundreds of drawings for the design of the House over the Brook and directed its construction in person, so as to define all details meticulously. In fact, the built version differs from his design by a mere 0.5 cm
Opposite page, above: view of one of the the two side entrances. entrances. Below: longitudinal section. The house has very precise proportions – in plan and in section it is formed of two paired golden rectangles. The curvature of the bridge’s arch mirrors the brook’s sloping banks
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Top: the living area. Above: the staircase staircase from ground level leads to the living level of the house. Regarding his choice of material, Williams said, “For the first time, time,
a construction material, reinforced concrete, can be used without the need for masking or cladding, which is equivalent to constructing without giving a false impression”
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wide enough for a car, bends to the right and leads to the master building. First however, in the midst of the dense vegetation, the outbuilding can be seen in its entirety. This pavilion was designed to contain the garage and accommodate the owner’s domestic staff, thus defining a functional programme that to all effects envisaged another home, except that here the spaces
are minimal. The kitchen is divided from the bedrooms by an open-air courtyard, a patio, an important space serving as a hub in the economy of walking routes and domestic life of the small residence. In the patio, a washtub helps to give size to the layout. Basically, there are three elements here: the whiteplastered volume of the two bedrooms; the curved, natural stone wall, hooked at either end to enclose the kitchen on one side and the garage on the other; and the void of the patio inbetween. The white volume contains two rooms of equal size, on either side of a central axis. Dividing them in the middle are the entrance hall and the bathroom. The plan is not a regular one, but takes up the form of a circumference sector lopped off at its point by another circumference sector. The peculiarity of this small volume is its roof, which brings us back to the association with Le Corbusier, his studies of low vaults and in particular, his sketch called Ma Maison . Williams borrowed this example to build the roof using two reinforced concrete vaults, prefabricated according to the methods advocated by the French engineer Eugène Freyssinet, in positions corresponding to the two bedrooms. Inside, the rooms are lit mostly from above, through the aperture created between the vault and the pe rimeter wall. Once again the result produces excellent plasticity, where Williams displays is capacity to seize the potential of a construction technique combined with an admirable command of composition. Maintained throughout his long career, that talent enabled him to build other examples of rare beauty.
Top and above: detail of a technical element and general view of the flat roof. Using a construction technique that was unusual for the time,
Page 80-81: the ascent to the living quarters is a gradual, ritual passage from the shadowy shadow y underbrush underbrush to the conquest of light
Williams placed a raised pavement distanced by small masonry blocks blocks on top of the reinforced concrete slab
Upstairs, the lofty position close to the treetops gives the impression of being higher up than one actually is
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