Argentina · Architecture · Córdoba

Textured Walls Enclose Maricel’s House in Central Argentina

A 250-square-metre house in Córdoba by architect Edgardo Marveggio turns a closed, private street frontage into an introverted courtyard home — and shows how a small Argentine dwelling can answer a hot, dry climate with concrete, plaster, shade and a single double-height heart.

Constructive Voices · Updated September 2026 · Part of the Countries Built Environment record

Cordoba, Argentina — Córdoba province, where Maricel’s House stands in the agricultural town of Morrison — a hot, dry interior climate that rewards shade, thick walls and privacy. Photo: Alakasam via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Maricel’s House is a small project that answers several large questions at once. Designed by the Argentine architect Edgardo Marveggio for his ex-wife — the two worked closely together from the first concepts to the smallest details — it sits in Morrison, an agricultural town in the province of Córdoba, among low-scale neighbours. What makes it worth examining is how a 250-square-metre dwelling, built on a roughly rectangular plan, uses a closed street frontage, a thick-walled material palette and a single double-height room to create privacy, climate comfort and a strong sense of interior life. It is a lesson in how much can be done with a small footprint when the design is disciplined.

01 / The place

Building in Córdoba’s climate

To understand Maricel’s House you have to understand where it stands. Córdoba lies in the centre of Argentina, in the transition between the humid Pampas and the dry, hot interior — a region of long, bright summers, strong sun and a significant day-to-night temperature swing. In this climate the design priorities are clear: keep the sun off the walls and openings in the heat of the day, use thermal mass to absorb heat and release it slowly, shade the outdoor space, and allow the building to breathe at night. These are the same passive strategies that have always shaped building in Argentina’s interior, and they recur throughout the house.

Morrison is an agricultural town, low-rise and dispersed, and the street is part of the design brief. In a place where the plot is overlooked and the street is exposed, the choice is between displaying the house to the road or turning it inward. Marveggio chose the second, and that decision shapes everything that follows.

Climate as the starting point

A hot, dry interior climate with strong sun makes shade and thermal mass the first design tools — not air-conditioning. The house is organised around keeping the sun off and the interior cool, which is exactly what the closed frontage and thick walls achieve.

02 / The plan

Intersecting bars, boxes and planes

Agricultural landscape in Argentina — Morrison is an agricultural town, and the house is a domestic building in a working landscape — low-rise, dispersed and defined by its street. Photo: David via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

The house is roughly rectangular in plan and composed of intersecting bars, boxes and planes — a set of simple volumes read together rather than a single block. Its two storeys are organised so that the ground floor holds a bedroom suite, a kitchen and an open area for dining and lounging, while the top floor contains a further bedroom. The two levels are linked by a concrete floating staircase that was conceived as a sculptural element in its own right, and the rooms are fitted with contemporary furniture and artwork.

The organisational key is the central module: a double-height space with zenithal light — light from above — and a waffle-slab roof. The architect described this module as “the focal point and linking spot of the whole building,” and it does the work that a courtyard or a stairwell does in other houses: it gathers the plan, brings daylight into the middle of a deep, otherwise enclosed footprint, and gives the interior its sense of volume. In a house that turns away from the street, the double-height heart is the compensation — the place where the dwelling opens, upward and inward.

Grassland landscape in Argentina — Maricel’s House stands in an agricultural town in Córdoba province, in the transition between the humid Pampas and Argentina’s hot, dry interior. Photo: Mushii via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

03 / The façade

Walls that hold the street at bay

The most striking thing about the house from outside is how little it offers the street. It is surrounded by walls that block views from the road and from neighbouring buildings, and facades of exposed concrete and thick plaster. The architect’s stated intention was explicit: the walls give shape to the main idea — to provide privacy from the public and the roadside. A small front garden and a backyard sit inside this envelope, so the outdoor life of the house happens behind the wall rather than in front of it.

The materials are doing more than one job. Thick plaster and exposed concrete are, first, a thermal strategy: mass that delays the passage of the day’s heat into the interior. They are also, second, a tactile one — the house is defined by the texture of its surfaces, which is why walls and plaster are the words most often used to describe it. And they are, third, a privacy strategy: a solid, textured wall presents almost nothing to be read from the street, which is precisely the point. In a hot climate, a thick, shady wall is also the cheapest form of climate control there is.

The introverted house

Maricel’s House belongs to a long tradition — the courtyard house, the inward-facing dwelling — in which the building protects its life from the street and finds its openness in a private core. The double-height heart of this house is that core, expressed vertically rather than as an open patio.

There is a single gesture toward the street, and it is deliberate. The only part of the house that acknowledges the road is on the upper portion of the front elevation, where a yellow waffle slab extends over a patio. It is a small, bright move in an otherwise closed composition — an overhang that both shades and announces, and the one place where the house allows itself to be seen.

04 / The climate design

Shade, mass and light from above

Read as a climate design, the house assembles a set of moves that are traditional to Argentina’s interior and increasingly central to green building.

Passive strategies at Maricel’s House
Element	Climate function
Closed street frontage and perimeter walls	Blocks solar gain and heat from the west/north sun; creates private, shaded outdoor space
Thick plaster and exposed concrete	Thermal mass — absorbs heat by day, releases it slowly as the night cools
Waffle-slab roof over the patio	Shades outdoor space and the upper facade; its form provides structure and shading at once
Double-height central module	Zenithal (top) light into the middle of a deep plan; natural stack ventilation to purge hot air
Small front garden and rear yard	Private outdoor space behind the wall — cooler, shaded, and protected from the street
Asymmetrical massing	Allows the plan to respond to sun, site and privacy rather than to a single rigid form

The waffle-slab deserves a note, because it is the house’s signature detail and one of its smartest. A waffle slab is a concrete roof with a grid of ribs — a structurally efficient way to span a large opening with less material than a solid slab, which also reduces the concrete and thus the embodied carbon. Here it is deployed as the overhang and the roof of the central module, so that structure, shade and the house’s identity are the same element.

The double-height module is the other piece of climate design. By taking light from above, it lets daylight into the centre of a plan that would otherwise be dark because its walls are closed to the street. The vertical space also creates natural ventilation: hot air rises and leaves through high openings, drawing cooler air through the house — the age-old stack effect, built into the heart of the dwelling.

A dry landscape in Argentina — In Argentina’s hot, dry interior, thick walls, shade and night ventilation do the work that mechanical cooling does elsewhere — passive design as the first climate strategy. Photo: Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

05 / Why it matters

A small house with a large lesson

Mountains and dry country in Argentina — Argentina’s interior climate rewards the ordinary, passive intelligence the house embodies: shade, mass and ventilation before machinery. Photo: Calyponte via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

Maricel’s House is not a flagship green building with a certificate on the wall. It is a modest private dwelling. That is exactly why it is instructive. The lessons it encodes are the ones that matter most for Argentina, because most of the country’s buildings are ordinary — houses, shops, small offices — and it is the ordinary stock that determines the overall environmental performance of the built environment.

Climate-first design is not a luxury. Shade, thermal mass, cross-ventilation and a courtyard-like core cost little more than their alternatives and reduce the need for mechanical cooling. The house proves the point at a normal, human scale.
Material efficiency is environmental efficiency. The waffle slab spans with less concrete; the plaster walls use simple, locally available finishes. Fewer materials, chosen well, is a green strategy as much as an aesthetic one.
Privacy and climate are the same problem. A closed wall that blocks the street also blocks the sun — which is the whole argument of the introverted house in a hot climate.
Small can be generous. At 250 square metres the house creates real spatial richness — a double-height heart, indoor–outdoor rooms, a sculptural stair — within a compact, efficient envelope.

The house also illustrates how the Argentine architectural culture described elsewhere in this record works in practice. Argentina has a strong modernist tradition and a profession comfortable with concrete as a material of both structure and expression. Maricel’s House is a contemporary continuation of that: rational volumes, honest materials, a sculptural stair, and a design intelligence that treats climate and privacy as the beginning of the plan rather than an afterthought. It is the ordinary end of the green-building spectrum — not certification, but a way of building that is, by its nature, resourceful.

06 / The materials

Concrete, plaster and the Argentine palette

The house belongs to a distinct Argentine material tradition, and understanding that tradition explains why it looks the way it does. Argentina, and Córdoba especially, has a strong culture of exposed concrete — hormigón visto — inherited from the mid-century modernism that shaped the country’s public architecture and sustained by a construction industry comfortable with the material. Concrete in Argentina is not a hidden structural filler but a finished surface, and architects use it for its weight, its texture and its ability to age. Maricel’s House carries the tradition forward, pairing exposed concrete with thick plaster to create the textured walls that define it.

The choice is also practical. In a hot, dry climate, a concrete or plastered masonry wall is thermal mass: it absorbs the day’s heat and releases it slowly as the night cools, moderating the interior without machinery. The thick plaster has a second benefit — it is repairable and re-finishable, so the house can be maintained and renewed over time rather than replaced. And the waffle slab, beyond its structural efficiency, exposes the underside of the concrete as a ceiling, so the material is both structure and finish, avoiding the added embodied carbon of a separate ceiling system.

The furniture and artwork inside complete the picture: the house is designed as a home, not as a demonstration, and its material palette is meant to be lived in. That is consistent with the way the best Argentine domestic architecture works — robust, climate-appropriate, materially honest, and made to last. It is also, quietly, a sustainability strategy: durable materials, repairable surfaces, and a building that will still be good, and still be habitable without heavy cooling, decades from now.

Material honesty as a green strategy

A surface that is both structure and finish, made of durable local material that can be repaired rather than replaced, is resource-efficient by design. The house’s palette is an Argentine tradition that happens to be a modern green argument.

07 / In context

Córdoba’s architectural scene

Maricel’s House is part of a wider body of contemporary work in Córdoba province, which has become one of Argentina’s most active architectural scenes outside Buenos Aires. The region is known for houses and small buildings that use concrete, stone and simple geometry with a strong sense of material and climate — overlapping concrete and stone layers, tall narrow residences, and a continuing interest in exposed structure. This is architecture of a specific place, made by a generation of Argentine architects who treat the interior’s climate and materials as the basis of design rather than as constraints to be overcome.

That matters for the country’s sustainability story. The most environmentally significant architecture is not the certified tower but the ordinary building done well: the house that shades itself, the small building that uses less material, the design that needs less cooling because it was thought through. Córdoba’s scene is full of this work, and Maricel’s House is a clear example of it — a building whose green credentials are structural, not promotional, and which shows that the principles now formalised in green-building standards have been part of Argentina’s architectural culture for a long time.

Read against the rest of this record, the house completes a picture. Argentina’s biodiversity faces deforestation, mining and climate; its green-building sector is moving performance into the top of the commercial market; and its architectural culture — at the ordinary scale, in a place like Córdoba — already knows how to build for its climate without much energy at all. The task for the country is to make that ordinary intelligence the default across everything it builds.

08 / The staircase

A stair as sculpture, and the double-height heart

Two elements give the interior its character, and both are worth dwelling on because they show how the house achieves generosity on a small plan.

The first is the concrete floating staircase. Spanning the two levels, it was conceived as a sculptural element rather than a circulation necessity — a cantilevered concrete form that reads as an object in the space and marks the transition between floors. In a house of modest size, a well-made stair is often the single strongest interior gesture, and here the material and the cantilever give it real presence. It also reinforces the house’s material logic: the same concrete that forms the walls, the roof and the slab also forms the stair, so the palette stays coherent and the number of different materials stays low.

The second is the double-height central module. This is the spatial and climatic core of the dwelling: a tall space with light from above and the waffle slab overhead, which the architect called the focal point and linking spot of the whole building. Its functions are several. It brings daylight into the middle of a deep, closed plan, so the interior never depends on the street for light. It creates volume, giving a 250-square-metre house a sense of height and generosity it would otherwise lack. And it drives ventilation, since hot air rises within it and can escape at the top, drawing cooler air through the lower rooms — the stack effect, built into the house’s centre.

Together the stair and the double-height module explain the design’s economy. The house does not buy its spatial quality with extra floor area or extra materials; it gets it from a single tall volume and a single sculptural element, both organised around the same structural logic. That is efficient design in the fullest sense — more quality per square metre, and per tonne of concrete — and it is the reason a small house on an unremarkable street in an Argentine agricultural town is worth studying.

Zenithal light

Taking light from above rather than from the sides is what allows the walls to stay closed to the street. The double-height module trades a view for privacy and daylight at once — the central idea of the plan.

09 / Key takeaways

Key takeaways

Maricel’s House is a 250 square-metre dwelling in Morrison, Córdoba province, designed by Edgardo Marveggio for his ex-wife.
It is organised as intersecting bars, boxes and planes, with a double-height central module, zenithal light, a waffle-slab roof and a sculptural concrete floating stair.
Its closed street frontage, perimeter walls and thick plaster and concrete facades deliver privacy and thermal mass — a passive climate strategy for Córdoba’s hot, dry interior.
The single gesture to the street is a yellow waffle slab over a patio on the upper front elevation.
Its lessons — shade, mass, cross-ventilation, material efficiency and courtyard-like privacy — are the ones that matter most for Argentina’s ordinary building stock, not only its flagship green buildings.
It reflects a strong Córdoba scene that builds with concrete, stone and simple geometry, treating climate and materials as the basis of design.
Its spatial quality comes from a single tall volume and a single sculptural stair rather than from extra floor area — more quality per square metre and per tonne of concrete.
Its concrete-and-plaster palette is an Argentine material tradition (hormigón visto) that is also a resource strategy: durable, repairable, and both structure and finish in one.

Frequently asked questions

Where is Maricel’s House and who designed it?

It is in Morrison, a town in Argentina’s Córdoba province, designed by the Argentine architect Edgardo Marveggio for his ex-wife, with whom he collaborated closely on the project.

What is the house made of?

It has facades of exposed concrete and thick plaster, a waffle-slab concrete roof, and a concrete floating staircase. The materials provide thermal mass for the hot, dry Córdoba climate as well as their textured appearance.

Why is the house closed to the street?

To provide privacy from the public and the roadside. The property is surrounded by walls that block views, with the outdoor life happening in a small front garden and rear yard behind them.

What is a waffle slab and why is it used?

It is a concrete roof with a grid of ribs, which spans a large opening efficiently with less material than a solid slab. It appears here over the patio and central module, providing shade, structure and reduced concrete use at once.

How does the house stay cool without relying on air-conditioning?

Through passive strategies: walls that block the sun, thick plaster and concrete that absorb heat and release it slowly, a shaded patio under the waffle slab, and a double-height core that draws daylight and drives stack ventilation.

Why is a small house like this relevant to green building?

Because most buildings are ordinary, and it is the ordinary stock that determines the built environment’s overall impact. Maricel’s House shows that climate-first, material-efficient design can be done at a normal domestic scale.

More on Argentina

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Primary sources and news citations

Dezeen, Textured walls enclose Maricel’s House in central Argentina by Edgardo Marveggio (original report; project facts and photography by Gonzalo Viramonte).
ArchDaily, Maricel House / Estudio Edgardo Marveggio.
Dezeen, Argentine architecture and materiality.
Argentina Ministry of Environment, sustainable construction context.
World Green Building Council, passive design and certification.
World Bank, Argentina country data.

Methodology and sourcing. Project facts — location, size, materials, plan, stair and the architect’s stated intentions — follow the original reporting cited. Climate and passive-design statements describe standard practice for Argentina’s interior; where the house’s performance is inferred from its design rather than measured, this report says so. Images are openly licensed context photographs and do not depict the house itself. Position as at September 2026.

Images. Photos are openly licensed (CC0 / public domain / CC BY / CC BY-SA) and credited in each caption; they show Córdoba and Argentina as context and do not depict Maricel’s House, whose photographs are by Gonzalo Viramonte.

Constructive Voices

Textured walls enclose Maricel's House in central Argentina by Edgardo Marveggio

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