Pure Architecture

Argentina studio Además Arquitectura has completed a blocky concrete house protected by a rounded privacy wall in a suburban area of Buenos Aires.
Casa Alba II is a 248-square-metre (2,670-square feet) house located in the city’s Ezeiza-Canning neighbourhood.
The house was given a wall that curves around the corner of the 0.3-acre lot, serving as both a boundary and a space-generating element.
“Casa Alba II explores the wall as an architectural device that constructs privacy while redefining the relationship between domestic life and the city,” Además Arquitectura told Dezeen.
“Drawing on the legacy of Luis Barragán, the project adopts an introspective approach, turning inward to create a controlled and atmospheric interior world.”
“Rather than a secondary element, the wall becomes the central architectural device, organizing views, light and circulation,” the studio continued. “The house unfolds inward, with each space relating back to this perimeter condition.”The perimeter wall serves to distance the residence from its suburban surroundings, filtering visual and spatial connections and reflecting natural light indirectly onto the interior of the wall into the house through large windows.
Completed in 2024, the program is arranged in a series of volumes that run diagonally to the street, oriented toward a central intersection and running north to south.A central axis separates the public and private areas, with three private sleeping areas on the west side of the house.

Metabolic Wall is a small pavilion in the Italian hills of Pietrarubbia.The project takes the form of a linear timber wall made from a modular grid sized to hold standard hay bales, with several units removed to open a passage through the structure. Rather than enclosing an interior, the intervention acts as a threshold in the landscape: a long, porous marker that frames views, registers seasonal change and gradually alters through use by animals, weather and decay. The hay infill is not treated as cladding or insulation but as a living, time-based material. Birds pull it apart for nests, wild boars disturb its base, insects burrow into it and fungi begin to soften and transform it. As the organic mass recedes, the timber frame is slowly exposed, shifting the pavilion from density to lightness. In its final phase, the structure is dismantled and repurposed, extending the project’s metaphor of reuse and return.

Project Name: Metabolic Wall
Location & Year: Pietrarubbia, Italy - 2025
Architects: &