AtelierM shapes GP House around a spiral that runs from a central courtyard pond straight up to a rooftop terrace, letting circulation and geometry solve the same problem at once. Designed by the Buenos Aires-based studio for a plot on the edge of a lagoon, the residence resolves the tension between a curved corner street and an open waterfront through one continuous spatial gesture rather than a set of separate rooms. The result treats water and movement as structural material, not backdrop.
Two curves set the terms of the entire design: the bend of the corner street on one side and the arc of the lagoon opening at the rear of the plot on the other. AtelierM read these as the site’s real geometry rather than as constraints to straighten out, and let a spiral unfold between them — a form that organizes both the layout of the house and the day-to-day experience of moving through it.
A reflecting pond anchors the plan at its central courtyard, pulling the presence of the lagoon into the interior of the house before a single window has opened onto the view outside. From this core, a spiraling patio climbs to the roof of the second level, linking the ground-floor public areas to open terraces on the third and sixth levels — a single circulation path doing the work three separate staircases might otherwise handle.
The spiral organizes more than movement between floors. It shapes the spaces themselves and their relationship to what surrounds them: the house opens toward the lagoon, framing views and creating platforms built for looking rather than passing through, while turning its back on the street to protect privacy and reinforce the sense of the house as a refuge. Fran Silvestre Arquitectos reached a comparable conclusion by different means in a recent house organized around five cylindrical volumes in Las Rozas, where curved geometry carried the entire program rather than decorating it.
Light changes meaning as the spiral turns. Each section of the curve enhances natural light differently and shifts the perceived scale of the space around it: social areas unfold toward the open landscape, while service spaces settle into the tighter folds where the spiral pulls in on itself. This continuity between levels builds what AtelierM treats as an interior landscape in motion, where each space anticipates the one that follows it.
Concrete behaves like water here rather than like mass. The studio conceives it as a liquid stone that flows with the curves of the project instead of resisting them, echoing the movement of the streets outside — a material logic built entirely around the spiral rather than applied to it afterward.
Transparency does the opposite job. Where the concrete gives the spiral its mass, lighter and more transparent surfaces take over precisely where the house opens toward the lagoon, and the resulting dialogue between opacity and transparency sharpens the spiral’s role as a device of transition. KWK Promes worked through a related premise in Poland’s Yaw House, where a circular sunken courtyard and a rotated concrete form became the organizing logic for an entire hillside residence.
A team of eight carried the project from 2022 to 2025, with Matías Mosquera, Camila Gianicolo, Cristian Grasso, Pilar Navarro, Carolina Tobar, Francisco Gomez Paratcha, and Dante Marinari on design, Carolina Pell on landscape, and Marcelo Mastropietro handling the structural design a curve this continuous depends on holding together.
The terraces at levels three and six are where the spiral’s logic stops being a diagram and becomes somewhere to stand. They are the platforms for contemplation the curve was built to produce — the point in the house where circulation, framed all the way up from the reflecting pond below, finally opens onto the water it has been organizing itself around the whole time.
GP House by AtelierM | Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina — Year: 2022–2025 — Key materials: concrete, glass