Scout House by BAAG Architects // Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Scouts and design. Yeah… In Australia they don’t really blend so well. Well, at least not in my experience. Yet, on the other side of the pacific, architecture studio BAAG, have recently opened their Scout House project in Buenos Aires and all I can say is that it totally schools our own scout-design relationship. Providing an architecture that facilitates education, high living standards and loads of creative playfulness, Scout House is 360m2 of pure South American suave.

Programmed with the young scout in mind, the house is staged on five concrete floor plates where a skylight-lit internal courtyard breaks down inter-level height barriers; helping the building breathe and function as a whole. As well as incorporating further individual mezzanine spaces, this multi-level interior strengthens the visual and acoustic connectedness throughout. Can you imagine though? Hundreds of badge-hungry scouts, all screaming for the last unsold brownie. What a nightmare! Therefore, BAAG designed some beautifully crafted timber partitions into the building, so calm and quiet spaces could be reestablished when needed.

Harvested from the native paradise tree, these timber elements have an ‘out of this world’ grain directionality and serve to isolate internal spaces by sliding, swiveling and spinning throughout the building. Providing an ever-changing and inspired space for its occupants. BAAG further bridges the materiality clash between concrete and timber by using planed ‘Eliotis’ boards for the insitu formwork. Resulting in undulating, smooth and polished concrete surfaces, the technique hybridizes the materials and embeds a new timber scale within the rest of the architecture. Although this dialogue between juxtaposing materials earns some seriously delicious design brownie points from me, take a look at that exterior and its awesome use of rebar. Those clever cookies at BAAG wrapped the front and rear elevations, as well as the roof in a dual-purpose security screen and green façade substructure by bending construction-grade reinforcing bar into a patterned 3d mesh. What a sweet reinterpretation of rebar? Hurrah for rebar.

Visually arresting, BAAG’s material palette and programmatic approach to form generation stems from an in depth understanding of materiality and the programmatic needs of the scout community. Marrying in-situ concrete, a selection of native timbers, hard-waring insitu mosaic flooring and a sick as hell planting/security mesh, scouts in Buenos Aires clearly have it pretty good.

[Images courtesy of BAAG. Photography by Federico Kulekdjian.]