The program developed by Ariel Jacubovich Oficina de Arquitectura is distributed across ten levels that combine commercial spaces, offices, and residences. The twenty residential units are all different and incorporate double-height spaces, split levels, duplexes, triplexes, and garden terraces, offering an alternative to the typical homogenization of contemporary collective housing.
Regarding the materials used, the building is constructed with a reinforced concrete load-bearing structure that accommodates the variations of each unit and reinforces the relationship between structure and spatial organization. The perforated exposed concrete façade functions as a continuous skin that allows the sequence of solids, voids, terraces, and interior circulation to be perceived from the outside, resulting in an architectural image coherent with the project's constructive and conceptual logic.
BLOCK Building by Ariel Jacubovich Oficina de Arquitectura. Photograph by Javier Agustín Rojas.
Project description by Ariel Jacubovich Oficina de Arquitectura
Located near the former Abasto Market, Block is a mixed-use building that, across ten floors, accommodates retail spaces, offices, and housing. The twenty residential units are all different: they combine split levels, double-height spaces, duplexes, triplexes, and garden terraces, proposing an expanded field for collective housing while challenging the homogenization imposed by the logic of the real estate market. The project begins with a fundamental operation: making the internal complexity of contemporary dwelling visible from the exterior.
The sectional variations of each unit generate a multiplicity of spatial situations aimed at enriching domestic life and allowing each inhabitant to identify with their home in a singular way. Rather than dissolving, these differences are projected outward: the blocks stack while affecting one another, shifting and generating voids that determine the final form of the building.
The morphology is not imposed a priori or from the outside, but rather emerges from the internal relationships between the dwellings, from the way they interlock and influence one another. This same logic allows the envelope — a continuous perforated shell of exposed concrete — to render the building’s internal organization legible through the façade. Each unit punctures the skin without interrupting its structural continuity, revealing from the street the way life unfolds inside.
The construction is resolved through a reinforced concrete load-bearing structure that advances, recedes, or changes shape depending on whether or not it separates units, visually reinforcing the relationship between structure and modes of occupation. The result is a building that reveals itself progressively: as one moves along the sidewalk, the façade shifts and exposes a sequence of solids and voids, terraces, staircases, and double-height spaces that shape its spatiality.
Block is part of a series of collective housing projects developed by the office for the real estate market, based on playful figures as a design strategy to explore new organizational logics and variations of housing units. These include Puzzlehomes, Tetris, and Cubik, the latter currently under construction.
The project draws its reference from the memory of the neighbourhood and from the market itself, back when it functioned as Buenos Aires’ wholesale supplier and goods were stacked in the streets, leaving gaps between crates as they rose in height. Block translates this logic into an architectural version: a game of interlocking forms, accumulations, and displacements that produces an amorphous yet coherent figure where, as in a game, each design decision triggers the next.
The final form does not respond to a typology, but rather to a rule-based design process focused on variation and systematicity instead of repetition. In this way, the building does not seek to impose itself upon the context, but rather to extend the vitality of the neighbourhood by integrating into the urban ecology of Abasto, accentuating its rhythms, programmatic mix, and history through a piece of architecture that proposes new ways of inhabiting the city.
